actuals exceed budgets or approach within a certain percentage of a total department or project budget. Also, data entry operators can be prevented from entering new expenses or orders that cause funds to be overcommitted or combinations of actual spend plus committed spend to exceed specific expense budgets. Budget to actual comparatives may require reporting against multiple time series and variance scenarios, for example:calendar day, week, month, quarter, year and inception to date time series fiscal day, week, period, quarter, year time series other time series calendars such as tax, statutory or group reporting calendars monetary or unit variance, variance percent and ratio percent prior time series comparatives such as last period, last quarter, last year Budget report writers should allow budgets to be compared not just against actuals but against each other and provide a means to drill down from summary budget numbers to more detailed budget numbers. Instant charting of budget to actual comparisons is also a useful function for visualizing variance and exception data. The automatic transfer of comparative reporting data directly into external worksheets helps with further analysis and trend reporting. Budgeting databases. The budget database must be accessible to other query and reporting tools through SQL or ODBC, for example, to allow a wider range of analysis and reporting options. Alternatively, budget analysis and reporting is a good application for using a multidimensional database such as Arbor's Essbase Analysis Server or TM1 Software's TM1 Server to store and manage the budget data. Certainly if budgeting is managed within the accounting system itself, the budget data should be kept in separate tables or files than the actuals data for better performance....
