How do I produce Financial Management Reports?
To best understand the financial reporting functionality in ExpensePlus, please view the module overview video below:
Financial reporting is an important part of any financial system and workflow. The question of how to produce financial management reports though may be misleading. Why?
ExpensePlus has a 'live', 'real-time', and 'always-on' reporting module, which allows users to access reports on demand according to their permissions and preferences. Therefore, whether a user is a volunteer, a staff member, or a trustee, if you customise their user access correctly (via the user settings screen), they can access the reports they need.
A commonly used report, to function as a 'financial management report', is the 'Income & Expenditure Summary (by Fund) report'. This is accessible from the sidebar menu and will display to users the data relating to the categories that they have permission to view, either in a summarised or detailed view.
By selecting one or more of the simple filter controls (shown in black), you can:
- Show all funds or specific funds;
- Condense to provide a quarterly split or an annual total;
- Show at 'parent level' (category groups) only, whereby the report will condense the individual categories, combining to provide their aggregate total at group level. For example, the aggregate total of 'One-off gifts', 'Standing Orders', 'Sunday offerings', and 'Via Website' would be shown as 'Donations'.
The screenshot below shows the same report with annual totals and Category groups only:
The report displays information in the following columns:
- Actual Income or Expenditure (year to date reconciled figures);
- Anticipate Income or Expenditure (pro-rata allocation of budget totals for the period covered by the report);
- Variance (difference between the two above, where a budget has been set);
- Total budget (annual budget total set in the system);
- Budget Received (% of the above);
- Projected total (forward prediction, multiplying the actual income by % variance and the remaining duration of the budget period).
As mentioned above, reports are self-service, enabling those with permission to remain up-to-date with current, real-time figures. However, if you want to download and distribute a report by email or print hard copies, you can do so using the download as PDF or CSV buttons. When producing a PDF report, our system determines layout and page breaks and this is not user-customizable. Please choose the CSV option if you wish to customise the layout of the downloadable report yourself.
