help please - variance report
Mike or Penny Novack
stepbystepfarm at mtdata.com
Wed Sep 10 07:31:30 EDT 2008
>
>
>The committee last night asked me to produce a monthly variance report and
>explained that it was a report showing the difference between the monthly
>actual amounts received and spent and the expected amounts that were set when
>making applications for grants. I guess they mean a budget.
>
>Can gnucash help me to do this, and if so, how? I have looked through the mail
>archives and cannot find anything.
>
>
Just so -- you produce a budget report and an actual transactions
report. From these you produce (by hand) the requested "variance report".
Could/should GnuCash (or any other similar application) be able to
produce the "variance report" automaticly? Probably not. This is a case
where any/all discrepancies are probably going to need annotation. It
wouldn't really help to have an automated "variance" report produced "in
editable form" as in real life you might sometimes have to annotate
items which were NOT numerical discrepancies*. In other words, the whole
report has to be editable so might as well be a document produced by hand.
Michael
* Example --- a large bill due in the period in question that was not
paid because under dispute. Or perhaps a large amount where the vendor
was late sending an invoice. Something like that represents a contingent
discrepancy from budget and should be noted in a variance report for
this period as an alert that their is a "bombshell" lurking. Especially
as your organization seems to involve grants, obviously budgeted amounts
and amounts spent might get out of sink with grant money promised but
not actually received.
Thankfully this is something that I don't have to do for my
organization. Our income being relatively regular during the year but
our expenditures so heavily skewed to just the few months of the growing
season a monthly "cash flow analysis" would be meaningless.
--
There is no possibility of social justice on a dead planet except the equality of the grave.
More information about the gnucash-user
mailing list