Keeping an Eye on Your Budget Report

Providing you set your monthly budget figures within each nominal record, you can run reports comparing actual figures versus budget figures to calculate a variance. The actual figures are the cumulative values posted to each individual nominal record for the period you select. The budget figures are the values that you recorded when you set budgets for the forthcoming year; you can attribute each nominal account a budget. The variance is calculated by subtracting the budgeted figure from the actual figure. If the actual figure is smaller than the budget figure, the variance figure has brackets around it.

The Budget report is in the same format as a Profit and Loss report (refer to Figure 18-1), with additional columns for Actual, Ratio, Budget and Variance for both the current period and the year-to-date.