General Ledger Report Spotlight: Project Reports

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If your organization uses the additional module Projects, Grants and Endowments, you will notice additional categories of reports within General Ledger; Grant Reports and Project Reports. Today, I wanted to focus on some of our Project Reports. As you may know, you are able to filter Financial Statements and other canned reports on projects as well as manipulate formatting of non-project reports to be more project oriented.

I would first like to introduce our Project Activity Report. The Project Activity Report lists projects’ Income Statement activity for a time period you select. This report includes the beginning Fund Balance, Activity, and Ending Fund Balance for each project and will reconcile to the Income Statement when filtered on the same project. This report can be in a summary or detail format. If you want to see only the projects’ change in Fund Balance, I recommend running this in Summary. If you would like to see the projects’ Income Statement account balances, I would run the report in detail.

We also have a Project Detail Report. I like to compare this report with the General Ledger Report in that it reports on all account activity but is sectioned off by Project. Under each project, there is a beginning, account net change, and ending balance for every account. Depending on how much information you need, you may run it in Detail or Summary. In detail format, the report provides general ledger account level balance and transaction detail. The summary format provides the change in account balances.  This report eliminates the need to run multiple general ledger reports changing the project filter each time; it knows to divide activity by Projects.

The Project Financial Statements report shows an Income Statement and/or a Balance Sheet for individual projects. You are able to choose if you want one type of report or both. It is sorted by project first and under each project header will be your report types. You may choose to page break on each new project if you prefer clear separation. Additionally, you also have control on the level of detail you see; you can choose to only show balances for account category, account code, full account string and more.  I always like to mention the reporting time will be longer than a typical financial as it is producing, when both financials are selected, two multiplied by the number of projects you are filtering on reports. This report can save you from having to open your Income Statement(s) and Balance Sheet(s) and having to both run and change filters multiple times.

The Project Budget vs. Actual Report provides budget information and reports the actual activity of selected projects and accounts. It includes the following columns: Budget, Actual, $ Difference, and % Variance. This report, by default, will report on Income Statement accounts only, but you may choose to include balance sheet accounts if applicable. When running in detail, it shows you the budget vs. actual information on the account level grouped by Project. When running in Summary, it reports budget vs. actual information on the overall project level.

Within all of the above mentioned reports there are additional formatting options to customize the reports. I encourage you to explore the different settings within your reports as well as preview any reports you haven’t yet utilized; we have a lot of options out there!
News ARCHIVED | Financial Edge® Tips and Tricks 08/13/2015 10:44am EDT

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