With the end of the calendar year fast approaching, this also means that the end of the fiscal year is right around the corner for a number of companies too.
If that means that it’s time to develop budgets for next year, I have an idea that might save you some time. If your budget is already complete, no worries, you can always do this next time!
In these turbulent times especially, prudent managers will be looking wisely determine how to allocate for various expenses over the year. Certainly there will be certain mandatory, or fixed, costs, but there are always a number of areas wherein spending is optional, otherwise known as variable costs.
One way to assess what might be coming next year, especially if the manager is new to the business, or even the industry, is to review what the expenditures were in the past fiscal year – each and every one of them.
That could be a huge undertaking, and that’s where you come in. You want to make it easy for this person to be able to get a handle on where the dollars are going, regardless of the size of the business or the number of transactions.
Run a detailed general ledger report from your accounting system that displays all of the transactions posted to all of your GL expense accounts.
Now get yourself a fresh beverage and a fresh pad of sticky notes and set aside a couple of hours to meticulously review each of those hundreds or thousands of pages for the big expenditure items, using a different color highlighter pen for each of fixed and variable costs, taking notes of what you need to tell your budget manager.
Right…
Let’s try that again.
Open your Monarch model for that report. You do have one handy, don’t you? You’ll be able to create one in just a few minutes if you don’t have one already. Be sure that the model captures all of the fields and every detail line.
If your report doesn’t include the fiscal period for each expenditure item as part of the record, create a fiscal period field with a calculated field.
Now whip up two summaries. The first one has the GL account number and name as the leftmost key value. The fiscal period is an across key displayed at the top of the summary, and sums the net expenditure amount.
This gives the mile high view that lets your budget preparer see where the money went, and when.
Now duplicate that summary, and add the expenditure item description as the next key level. Sort the descriptions on a descending expenditure amount order.
Export each summary to a single Excel file, naming the sheets Summary and Detail. This facilitates the review and makes it easy to quickly copy and paste certain bits into an email message if the manager has to follow up with the accounting group. It also allows for a collaborative tool when the users sharing the work can add things like comments to specific cells in the workbook. Make the most of the digital tools available at every turn, and make it easy to use those tools.
Now in addition to being able to quickly see where most of the money went in a given account, you also have at least a partial answer to the question “How did we spend that much on…?” If nothing else, you’ve supplied enough information to be able to easily find more details should they be needed.
Your budget manager will be thrilled as a daunting task just became easier, and just might be more inclined to find room in the budget to accommodate your healthy pay increase. 
Save time. Save money. Heck – maybe even make money. Excel with Monarch!
