Personal Finance Manager Software (Beta) for Microsoft® Excel®

Income/Expense Report Page

The Expense Report page shows a high level view of your net income/expenditure (net income means money has been saved in the period, net expenditure means there are more outgoings than money coming in).  Income is shown throughout the file as negative (-); expenses are positive numbers.

This report will give you a good understanding of what money you have coming in and if you are making best use of it.  Hopefully from this you can assess the expenses that can be managed better.

If you have added or changed any data in the plan or actual figures you first need to update the reported information by clicking the “Update Figures With the Latest Plan / Transactions” button.

There are 6 main sections to this report.  In the heading you will see the current date and title of your report, you can set these in the “Main Menu” and “Periods” sheets.  There is also a link titled “View Analysis by Minor Categories”.  Clicking this will take you to a more detailed view of your finances, the Actual and Forecast sheet.

The information in the top middle of the main page highlights your actual income or expense against the plan (budget) that you currently have set.  The figures show both the current reporting month and the year to date.

The graph at the top left highlights your overall net income or expense by month.  The blue line represents the planned figures and the orange bars are your actual monthly data.  The background to this graph is orange if your actual performance is within 5% of your plan in the current month; if you are worse than plan by more than 5% the report is coloured red; better than plan by more than 5% is green.

The bottom left graph is a record of your income/expense category that is performing worst in the current year.  Again the blue line is your plan and the orange columns are actual performance.  You may want to take action that will stop or limit this variance in the future.  Or perhaps the additional expense (or reduced income) is unavoidable and you will need to update your plan accordingly.

The graph in the bottom middle is similar to the one in the bottom left, described above, except this one shows the variances that are in your favour (actual expense less than plan or actual income greater than plan).

Finally the graph to the right highlights the 6 main variances to plan in the current month.  The 3 main bad ones (adverse) and the 3 main good ones (favourable).  The titles of the categories are shown 1 to 6 below the graph. You should review these variances on a monthly basis and understand any significant variance to your budget.  Checking these can help you improve your monthly income and outgoings (utility bills that are increasing, mortgage interest rates, etc).  You have the opportunity to add comments for each variance by typing a message in the yellow cells (e.g. “Search for cheaper mortgage”, etc).

Help for this application:

| General | Main Menu | Periods | Major Categories | Minor Categories and Plan | Import Transactions | Income/Expense Analysis | Actual and Forecast | Transaction Reporting |

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