Department Actual vs Budget Reports (Using Projects)

LaQuanda Prince

In our organization, we track departments activity using projects and create project budgets for each department. Departments can have activity in more than one project. I’m looking to create a recurring report for department managers that shows their actual vs. budget activity, based on their departmental budget. I would like the report to display accounts that have a budget allocation but may not have any activity at the time the report is run.

I'm looking for report suggestions to provide clear, accurate actual vs. budget data to department managers? Any suggestions would be appreciated!

Sharelle Buyer

@LaQuanda Prince There should be a Project budget versus actual report in your listing of reports. That is what we use - we set our criteria to include the projects we want and have the budgets for the accounts we want listed on each of them. If you have any asset accounts on the report, it doesn't foot properly, but you can do some simple math to figure it out. Hope this helps.

Nikki Baldwin

@LaQuanda Prince, under Reporting, there is a template for ‘Project budget versus actual report’ available. On the Filters section, you can 'include projects with no activity' and you can also set the filters to be for specific projects, if you'd like. On the Content section, you'd select which budget scenario you'd want to be shown on the report. Depending on your department heads' rights – i.e. if they are limited to only seeing their Projects on the individual user level – you could make one report and they would all only see their own Project(s). If you don't have their rights set up like that, then you may want to create separate reports filtered per department/project. I know you said some activity crosses projects, so just need to pick what works best for your needs there.

Roberta A. Gilbert

@Nikki Baldwin
@Sharelle Buyer

Yes this is exactly what we do. Project Budget vs Actual, and then create one for each dept head that filters only the projects they want to see.

Twila Moore

@LaQuanda Prince We set up income statements for each department. They include actual and budget amounts for current and year to date periods. We set up departments based on queries to pull in the correct info for each department. It seems to be more helpful for the end users than the actual vs budget project report.