How to create a custom report for Actuals vs Budget

FrancoisB

Hello,

Is there a way to create or is there an out of the box report for these two reports:

1. Year to date Actuals vs Budget
2. Actuals vs budget with from and to dates

Thanks

jacobs

In short, no. Surprising, right?

Fortunately, the developers have now marked this feature request as "Planned", which means it's secured a spot on their development roadmap. We just don't know when it will arrive. I keep homing it'll be soon… but it's been a long wait!

For the current time, the only way to get an actual versus budget report is to export your budget to a spreadsheet, delete the columns for future months, create columns to sum the remaining months of actual values and of budget values. Not optimal, but doable.

I should note that you can view actual-versus-budget year-to-date on screen; you just can't print it. If the second column on your budget screen is January and not budget-versus-actual, click the little "«" icon at the top of the first column to open up these additional columns. And if it is showing January to December, click the "v" icon and select Budget Year-to-Date Totals so it changes to show January to March. You just can't print it. Go figure!

But there's a bigger problem. You can't specify a time period, such as year-to-end-of-last-month. So when you view year-to-date today, March 3, you're getting actual income and expenses from January 1 through March 3, while comparing to the budget from January through (all of) March — a not-particularly-useful comparison of 2.1 months to 3 months. In fact, the comparison is only accurate on the last day of each month (and that assumes all your transactions for the month are downloaded/entered). And that's why we need to the developers to implement a true budget-to-actual report. Until then, exporting and manipulating a spreadsheet is the only true way to get such a report.