Bi-Monthly Reports

[frmbc]

We have Business meetings on a bi-monthly basis, is there any way to generate a Balance Sheet report and an Income and Expense report to have two columns, one for each month? Currently I have to run each report twice, once for each month, export to excel, and then copy and paste the columns.

I tried going through the Custom Reports but I didn't see the fields that I wanted in the list.

Also, is there a simple report that shows the fund balances, income, and expenses for a given period in summary form?

-Thanks

[Zaphod]

For the Balance Sheet, your method is probably the only one at this point. In v9, there is a new Income and Expense by Month report. It shows all months for a fiscal year though, not just two. The simple fund balance, income, and expense summary you mention sounds like the Changes in Equity report; also new in v9.

[tborgal]

The Changes in Equity report doesn't really address the request for a Fund Balance Report as discribed. This is one change in V9 that I don't like. V 8.5 had a Fund Blance Report that gave a lot of good information on one sheet. YTD Income, Month Income, YTD Expense, and Month Expense, with a Year Start and current Fund Balance. Neither the Fund Balance Report or the Changes in Equity report give this. The Equity Report comes close, but is only a monthly report and does not give each fund on one sheet. If you have ten funds you get ten sheets. The Fund Balance report gives you each fund on one sheet but does not give any icome and expense information, only net change is given, and no-one seems to understand what Direct Transactions are. Don't know what the thinking was with this change, but from my view it was a step backwards. Am I missing something here? I would prefer the old format and so would the people I report to.

[tborgal]

Correction. I just checked the Changes in Equity Report and it will give annual to date or any other period in the year. But not with all funds on one sheet listed seperately.

[frmbc]

Thanks all,

I did check out the Changes in Equity report and it does show the inflows and outflows, but still is not broken down for the months, and the columns are a bit confusing for the novice. I did try the Income and Expenses by Month as well, however, that report has a nasty habit of rounding the totals in odd ways and is not very accurate when it does that. Is there a way to turn that rounding off and show the complete dollar amounts?

-frmbc

[tborgal]

Never noticed this. Guess I don't use that report enough. Just ran a test with my data and noticed quite a difference between the Income and Expense by Fund report and the Income and Expense by Month. Through November there is a $1.00 error in the income and a $15.00 error in the expense, with a $13.00 error in the Excess Income/Expense line. That really is nasty rounding.

[Jeff]

There is not enough room on the income & expense by month to show the cents. 3 characters x (12 months + a total column) = 39 more characters to try to show. We had to shoehorn the report as it is to get all the information to show.

Each account is rounded, so there will be errors. The total will be off depending if you have more accounts >.50 or < .50.

[tborgal]

The space problem is understandable but the rounding is flawed. For example. I have numbers in a report that are rounded as follows.

6,464.51 is rounded to 6,464
206.49 is rounded to 207
1,287.01 is rounded to 1,289


All this aside, the original question of the Equity report is getting lost in the shuffle. Can this report be changed to look like the old Fund Balance report in previous versions, or do we learn to live with what we have?

[Jeff]

We seem to have a few different topics going in this thread, so I will try to addresses some of the issues as I make them out.

Accounting Fund Balance Report
Several of the changes in version 9 required a redesign of this report. I will try to outline our reasoning for the changes we made.

One of the biggest changes in version 9 is the ability to have multiple equity accounts in each fund. This report will now sub-total and level just like the balance sheet and income & expense statements do. Because of this new leveling, we could no longer stack the year to date and current period amounts on top of each other. That led us to changing the report to a landscape layout which many people have since told us they do not like. (You can print the report in portrait mode if you uncheck the “include annual totals” option.) To see an example of what I mean by the new leveling and sub-totaling, go here http://www.powerchurch.com/features/pdf ... lances.pdf

Another change to the Accounting Fund Balance is the addition of the direct transactions column. Prior to version 9 if you debited or credited the equity account directly, it changed the beginning balance column. So if you ran an accounting fund balances report for June, and then ran one for July, the beginning balance for July would not match the ending balance for June. (When there are transactions that directly effect equity accounts in the month of July.) This just wasn't good reporting practice and we need a way to show completely how you got from one amount to the other.

Combining the income & expense columns into the net change column. This change was really driven by 2 factors. Version 9 also optionally adds a new category of account called transfer accounts. Transfer accounts are to be used to transfer money from one accounting fund to another. The accounting fund balances report would have to show separate columns for income, expense, and transfer accounts. Showing the transfer column gets complicated because they optionally enabled by the user. The second issue complicating this was trying to squeeze all this information even onto a landscape report. It was very tight trying to show: Beginning balance, direct transactions, income, expense, transfer, and an ending balance column for both the current period and year to date sections, it just a lot of information to get on one report. Because of these changes we decided to report the net change of equity instead of trying the show income, expense and transfer as separate columns.

Keep in mind when I say there is not enough room, we design reports to show amounts between 99,999,999.99 and -99,999,999.99. That is our design criteria that the amounts fields can show these numbers as the maximum and minimum values. We have a few churches outside of the U.S. and this upper limit of 100 million of their currency is roughly 270,000 dollars U.S.

Change in Equity Report
The changes in equity report is a new report that closely resembles the Accounting Fund Balances, it will show all the columns listed above, but does not also show the year to date amounts as well. If you have not seen it in version 9, take a look, it is a pretty nice report. It will show, beginning balance, direct transaction, income, expense, transfer, release accounts (if you set them up), and the ending balance for each equity account. It can be run in consolidated mode or show each fund separately. If it is showing each fund separately, it does not provide a total of all funds at the end. A comment was made here about not page breaking between funds. I have checked into this and it looks like we can make that change very easily. So if that sounds like a good idea, we will make that change.

Income & Expense by Month Rounding
On the rounding issue, are these actual detail accounts that you are listing, or are these differences on sub-totals? We are not rounding sub-totals, each detail account is rounded then the sub-totals are calculated from the rounded amounts. If we don't do this, then you won't be able to add down a group and come up with the sub-total. If you have several accounts in a group that round up then the sub-total may change by quite a bit. But detail accounts should be rounded to the nearest dollar.

Original topic of Monthly Comparison
I really don’t have anything to add different from the posts above. The closest we have is the I&E by month report. There is not a way to produce a monthly comparison Balance Sheet or Accounting Fund Balances Report.

We have heard from a number of people that the new accounting fund balances report is not working for them. We are open to suggestion to making improvements to this report and I hope the background information will give you more idea of the new features that need to be accomodated in any changes.

We appreciate the feedback we receive from the users and hope this forum is a place where we can exchange ideas to make PowerChurch a better product and make your life easier too.

[tborgal]

Thanks for the background. As an end user I am not aware of what drives the changes that are made in new versions. I get set in my ways and get uncomfortable when things change.

I would personnaly be happy with the page break removal on the Change in Equity report. This would give me the information I really need on one page. Not having the total, which I did not notice when I had run this report before, is also a nice to have, but can do without because this information is included in other reports that I submit monthly. If needed I could always export to a spreadsheet and add the totals myself.

The rounding on Income and Expense issue. The numbers I came up with were taken from an Income and Expense by Fund Report for the month of November and compared to the November numbers in the Income and Expense by Month report. This would not be detail accounts since I only used a Summary Level of 3. In other comparisons I have made I have seen differences as large as $15. This did seem a little big to me, but again it would not be a detail report and from what you are saying it is not rounding from the numbers I am looking at.

After all this did the original question ever get answered?