Column Options and Order for Financial Statements - SOA & SFP
Could you please consider updating financials to include easier options as to which columns to pull in and it what order when you need a number of columns on the report? (e.g., monthly amounts for current year/prior year/budget, year-to-date amount for current year/prior year/budget, and associated dollar and % variances between any two columns)? For our board report, we currently have to pull together three templates into another custom report, then extract numbers from that custom report, delete various columns, and then drop that into an Excel file. Overall, your software is great, but the limitations with column setup in financials is a weakness and just too many steps to do every month, as well as leaving too much room for error in doing these multiple steps. In working with several other software packages in previous jobs and creating financial reports in each, we often used an offset # (e.g., -3 for March, if your year-end is June) and were able to designate various arrangements/combinations of columns for our SOA, for example. Just by using the offset and previously setting up report formats #’s designating what was needed in each column, we could run financials with just a couple of menu clicks. Following are some examples of column comparisons that are helpful/necessary to have in various instances:
Example:
Current Month Actual
Current Month Budget
$ Variance from Current Month Budget
% Variance from Current Month Budget
Current Month Actual
Current Month (Prior Year) Actual
$ Variance from Current Month (Prior Year) Actual
% Variance from Current Month (Prior Year) Actual
Current YTD Actual
Current YTD Budget
$ Variance from Current YTD Budget
% Variance from Current YTD Budget
Current YTD Actual
Prior YTD (Prior Year) Actual
$ Variance from Prior YTD (Prior Year) Actual
% Variance from Prior YTD (Prior Year) Actual