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
Lori Melby
shared this idea
- 12/4/2024:Financials: Updated the financial reporting to roll up the left-side menu once a report is selected. This will allow for options in the left-side menu to be more visible to users. We have updated the columns for Month over Month, Year over Year, and etc. to display the date range of the column header. If the financial report is over 2 time periods, the Change and Percent columns will display.
- Financials: Added Fund Custom fields to as an Edit option. This will allow for users to have columns based on fund custom fields.
- Financials: Renamed the Cash Flow report to Balance Change. This report shows balances over a time frame. This will help when tracking change in balances for the Balance Sheet accounts.
- Financials: Renamed the Cash Balance Report the Balance Trend report. This will allow users to track trends of the balance sheet accounts. Because we know that all foundations present their financials differently, a new print option has been added. This will allow you to determine the order of the columns. The recommended presentation per the AICPA is most recent column first. That is why financials default to newest period first.
- Resources:
- Balance Change Report
- Balance Trend Report
- Custom Reports
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Paul Tomkins
commented
I appreciate the improvements made but I don't think it totally answers the idea presented. It would be great to be able to have customization with the column options instead of the preset options presented by CSuite. For example, as mentioned in today's Catching Up with Releases webinar, having YTD actual, YTD budget, and prior YTD in one income statement report. Or, in the balance sheet report, having last quarter, the prior quarter, and last year.
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'Shawn Hedden'
commented
a way, either through custom fields/reports or within the edit options, to be able to run both a single month AND a YTD income statement with prior year comparisons on a single report? This is how my board prefers to review financials but I’ve found that I’ve needed to pull two reports and manually combine them. Please see attached for an example. In this example, we’re looking at both April 2024 with p/y comparison as well as Jan-April with p/y comparison.
I’ve found that combining these statements manually lends itself to error, for example if one report has activity in a certain account but the other statement does not, the line items don’t line up exactly.