Monthly Income/Expense Reports

[Mike or Penny Novack]

>
>
> However, for monthly internal managers meetings, the month-to-month 
> changes are important, leading to questions like "why were billings so 
> low in February, or how does this month compare to the same month last 
> year, or why were the utility expenses so different in April?".   This 
> usually is presented in the form of a bar chart summarizing things so 
> that unusual events stand out, followed up by more detailed looks at 
> the underlying data as needed.    For this I typically need one-off 
> reports generated on the fly.  They don't have to be pretty.
>
> Dave

 From personal experience paying organizational bills I would imagine 
that any such monthly comparison report would normally lead to so many 
"questions" (because of variance) as to make those meetings silly. Even 
with the annual report I usually need at least two or three footnotes 
along the lines of "invoice from vendor for a major annual meeting 
expense did not arrive till after the first of the year so this item 
charged twice in this year but not at all last year" (say explaining why 
annual meeting costs for one year vastly different from another).

I can make some effort to minimize income/expense items crossing years 
but do that every month? YUCK!

Let's use your specific example of a utility bill. If the utility 
happens to bill so the bills arrive in the middle of the month, no 
problem. But if that bill normally arrives within just a couple days of 
the end of each month then depending on when weekends fall relative to 
the end of the month might be VERY common for two bills paid some months 
and none some months.

Mike