Financial Reporting #3

Pierre Alain Carrier — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 13:53:16 +0000

This is the last post of this series on basics of financial reporting with XLGL. So far, we have seen how to import financial figure using the XGLP (P stands for period) and XGL (to fetch the balance at a given date). Today we’ll see how to get budgeted amounts from the GL.

The name of the worksheet function is XGLBudgets (I’m sure you guessed that one) and it works very much like XGLP. Here are some examples:

=XGLBudgets(4010, “August”)

will return the budget amount for account 4010 in August of the current fiscal year.

=XGLBudgets(“5010, 5020″, “First Quarter”, “Second Quarter”, “0100″)

will return the total budget amount for accounts 5010 and 5020, and department 0100, between the beginning of the first quarter and the end of the second quarter of the current fiscal year.

The function can be created using the XLGL console or using the Excel Insert Function wizard as explained in Financial Reporting #1.

As you may know, Simply Accounting requires you to define a budgeting period for your company: Monthly, Bi-Monthly, Quarterly, etc. When reporting using XLGL, you do not have to restrict yourself to these period. For example, if your budget are set as Monthly, you can still use the following function:

=XGLBudgets(4010, “First Quarter”)

In this case, XLGL will simply add the budget for the first three month of the year and return the result.

What if your situation is the opposite? You are using Quarterly budgets in Simply Accounting and want to report Monthly, as in:

=XGLBudgets(4010, “August”)

By default, XLGL will use linear interpolation to calculate the budget. In this case, XLGL will return the proportional equivalent for August. Note that this won’t be exactly a third of the budget because XLGL interpolate using daily calculation. As August as 31 days, it will have a bigger budget than September.

Beside linear interpolation, you can also decide to clamp up or down the returned value, that is return the complete amount either when the period is partly present or only when the period is completely included, or using cubic interpolation. Cubic interpolation will take into account budgets from previous and following period to calculate acceleration or deceleration and return a more precise figure.

In summary, the XGLBudgets function will cover all budgeting scenario easily. Although we did not talk about it, it will also cover project budgeting.

Do you have a budgeting problem? Would you like to know more about project budgeting? Let us know!

Posted in Financial reporting Tagged: Amounts, Budgeting, Budgets, Excel, Excel UDF, Figures, Financial reporting, Reporting, Simply Accounting, Worksheet functions, XGLBudgets

XLGL's Blog » Budgeting

Financial Reporting #3