Budget Profiles
This report allows a further way of assessing and reporting on your budgeted financial transactions, for different months of the year. Instead of looking at actual transactions, you are looking at your budgeted future expenditure for different months.
Your budgeted expenditure is likely to include bills which you may pay annually, such as insurances and registrations. It may also include items such as tax bills, major house repairs, school fees or an expense like a holiday.
Whilst you may be confident that your annual income exceeds your annual expenditure, you may be in a position that at certain times of the year, you run into problems with paying your bills.
Whilst putting it all on the credit card may be one option, other alternatives or reorganising the timing of bills may be cheaper for you.
The Budget Profiles Report.
Budget profiles are accessed from the Main menu > Reports > Budget Profile, or alternatively is accessible from the Cash Curve.
(It is very useful to call up a Budget Profile from the Cash Curve, to see precise details for a problem month.)
The facilities to Summarise or Compare are similar to Income and Expenses Reports or Balance Sheet Reports.
You can also filter your results. (Only available with the Small Business Edition) More details on Filters.
The above budget profile was performed in June 2008, to look at transactions for an investment property.
There is filtering for Investment Property transactions and the effects of a large rate payment are evident.
Budget Profiles allows a range of time comparisons:
- Month vs. Month
Select two months to compare. For example you may wish to compare a given month this year and last year. Note that early budgets may not be accurate (depending on how you set these up). - 3 month vs. 3month OR 6 month vs. 6 month
Month to month budgets often show variation simply due to the calendar. Payments made weekly can show variation month-to-month depending on the number of payment days in that month. Averaging over several months removes these variations.
- Month vs. Average
The purpose is to compare the budgeted expenditure in any month with the average.
Average can be for Past 12 months, Next 12 months, Past 6 + Next 6 months. The choice depends on the data available and where the selected month occurs in the 24 months from the current month
Clicking on category names gives you other viewing options.
Most categories have link to View Graph, Transactions (i.e. budget vs. Actuals). These options are available whenever you click on a category’s name:
Non available links.
Occasionally you may see a category with no link available. The reason is that there are no budgeted entries for the chosen month, but there are entries when averaged over 12 months.
An example is Electricity paid every 3 months – Jan, Apr, Jul, Oct. These months are currently arranged to show an active link. No link is currently provided for these other months.
Also applies to Income & Expenses.
