Financial Reporting and Visual Indicators

• November 3, 2015
• Kathy Jastrzebski

It’s Friday afternoon, 4:50 pm, suddenly you get a Budget vs. Actual Projects Report in your inbox. All you can think about is that it’s almost the weekend (you’re almost home free! And then bam that little envelope email notification). So much has gone on during the week that the last thing you want to do is spend time analyzing a report unless it’s absolutely vital. Now, if you are on the sending side of this, maybe the report has some really important information and you really want the person you’re sending the report to, to actually pay attention to it. How can you grab their attention? What would make your report stick out? (Especially if they don’t actually open it until Monday). Intacct has been adding new features to reporting making the ease of reading reports and ability to quickly scan and deduce key information easier – especially so with the addition of visual indicators. (Similar to what you see in KPI’s (key performance indicators) – those little green arrows, red dots, thumbs up, and thumbs down.)

Now you can add these to your reports so the person on the receiving end can quickly look at it and see if a project’s expenses are WAY above budget.

In this post we’ll review how to add Visual Indicators to a Profit and Loss – Budget vs. Actual Report in 3 easy steps:

Step 1: Navigation

Reports > Find the report you would like to add visual indicators to > Edit (pencil icon)

Step 2: Add the Visual Indicators:

Go to the “Columns” tab of your report (on the left) and click on the column you would like to add the visual indicators to. (In this report I’d like to add it to the Budget Variance column since I would like to know when I’m over budget).

Step 3: Choose a Visual Indicator Type and Deploy

You have four choices for Visual Indicators:

For this example, we’ll deploy the Trend Indicators (dots). To do that, select the following options at the bottom of the column:

A few clicks later and you’ve taken a report like this:

To a report like this:

Also, just a helpful tip to ensure the visual indicators actually work properly (meaning green dots showing for revenue above budget, and red dots for expenses about budget).

• The Budget Difference must be the “Budget Difference (normalized)” – this is how Intacct knows to show green dots when Revenue is above budget and red dots when Expenses are above budget.

If you looked at the second report you’ll see within a matter of seconds that expenses are above budget. That’s really the whole goal of reporting after all isn’t it? Being able to see key company financial information quickly on a high level and then being able to dig deeper if you so choose; the ability to have (at the tips of your fingers) an idea of what’s really going on in your company, without having to wait weeks to build a report in Excel.

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