[DGlezos]

Greetings;

In a large set of books for an NPO, out of probably 100 accounts, the monthly budget is not calculating properly for 4 of these accounts i.e. the 1/12 calc is not accurate; all the other accs are correctly calculated. I ran Check Books (no errors) & re-entered the budget for the affected accounts, with no change in the errors. Any suggestions?
Thanks..Dennis

[HMah]

I would look at the History View of the ledger and us B M for the headings. The monthly amounts for the year in question should all be the same.

[DGlezos]

Bingo! Thanks Henry. I must be using NV for 20 yrs & have never looked at the history view of any account. What other use is there for this view? I edited the problem accs & now the reports are fine.
Thanks again..Dennis

[DGlezos]

Spoke to soon. The 4 errors of which we were aware & I corrected manually occurred in revenue & expense accs. On closer review, all of the budget entries for the assets (capital additions) & liabilities (debt repayment) have problems in that the history view BM shows the total annual amount allocated to Dec/07, instead of being automatically allocated 1/12 to each month. We have followed the same steps in entering the budget this year as in past years (GL set to 01-01-07..31-12-07 , & have never had this problem. I really don’t want to have to manually enter each balance sheet acc monthly. Any ideas on why this occurred?
Dennis

[DGlezos]

Sorry to beat this thing to a pulp – I figured out that if in the account History view BM, I deleted the Dec/07 entry (which is the budget total for the yr & the only am’t appearing), contracted to the GL & entered the annual am’t again, the 1/12 allocation is correctly calculated. I think this is an acceptable work-around instead of having to manually enter each month….I’d still like to know why it happened in the first place.
Dennis

[BHalpin]

Here is what is going on.

Let’s say you are at the report level, with the type set to Budget, and a period of more then one month.

When you edit the amount shown on the report, the difference between the original amount and the amount you entered is divided by the number of months in the period, then each month is increased/decreased by the monthly amount. Simple enough. And in the case where you have a period of one year set and the original amount was zero, you end up with the 12 monthly budget amounts all set to 1/12th of the amount you entered.

But, you can end up in a dog-fight with the budget amounts if you inadvertanly edit a budget amount when the period is not set to a complete year. If, say it was set to 10 months, then any change you make will be equally applied over the 10 months, and the other two months will remain unchanged. Zeroing out the years budget amounts can be tricky too if the months are not all equal to start with. In that case whatever change you make is equally applied to the 12 months and you won’t end up with zeros in every month.

As was suggested above, don’t fight this at the report level (unless you like frustration.) Just expand into the account and go to the History view. In the 1st column set the Type to B and the Rep to M. Now you can zero out the months or set different amounts for each month without any problem.

Bob

[HMah]

Some clients use the history view to enter budgets when revenueexpenses are seasonal (ie: higher during summer months).

[DGlezos]

I think what happened Bob is that the report date on the GL was initially set to 0/31-12-2007 for the recording of the balance sheet amounts (capital asset additions & loan repayments). When my assistant got down to the Revs & Exps, she changed the report date to 01-01-2007/31-12-2007 & continued entering. Do you think this is why all the balance sheet budget amounts were allocated as a lump-sum to Dec/07 in the monthly history?
Dennis

[BHalpin]

Yup.

I tried the same thing – Begin 000 00,00 and End Dec 31,07, Type Budget. WHen you enter an amount it all get’s lumped into the last month of ’07.

The fun starts if you then change the Begin date to January 1,07 and then edit the 1,200.00 to 0.00. You end up with Jan – Nov all set to -100.00, and Dec set to 1,100.00

It’s perfectly logical that it would do this (evenly apply the -1,200.00 to each month of the year), but you can tie yourself up in knots unless you know how to use the History view to clean things up.

Bob

[Author]

Posts