Budget Analysis Difference Column - Why is it negative when ahead of budget?

[MeganGibson]

Hi All

This feels like a dumb question, but why is it that when I have spent LESS than budgeted on an expense, the P&L Budget Analysis $ Difference column reports this as a NEGATIVE number?

In my experience it should read as a positive. Being that we have SAVED money and have MORE than budgeted left over.

The Income is fine and so is the Net Profile/Loss, it's just the expenses that read different to what I expect. It's quite confusing to show my end users who are used to positve values depiciting line items that are ahead of budget.

Can I change this somehow?

Thanks in advance.

[Stuart_W]

Hi @MeganGibson

I would like to extend to you a very warm welcome to the MYOB Community Forum. I hope you find it a fantastic resource.

The way the expense and income value are displayed on the profit and loss report go to the way the profit itself is calculated. Basically profit is calculated as Income-Expense=Profit, so if you have a positive expense your profit is decreased and vice-versa. If you are not spending as much as you budgeted with respect to your expense accounts, then you would expect your profit to increase. So with our equation above, the difference in expense budgeted vs actual needs to be a negative in order to increase profit as you expect (i.e. income-(-expense)=profit => Income+expense=profit {profit increased}). If you display expense in this scenario as positive, then your profit is decreased and thus the report is not correct.

Hope this makes sense, if you need any further clarification then please don't hesitate to ask.

[Meegies]

Hi @Stuart_W

Thanks for the welcome, but I'm actually a long-term user, and just couldn't get into my regular account yesterday.

Is there any way that I can change the way this is displayed? I would very much like to display favourable variances as a positive figure.

If one does a simple google search for "budget variance report", they'll find nothing but example after example of it being displayed this way.

My end users (and myself) just cannot wrap our heads around reading it backwards after so many years.

Kind regards

Megan

[Haydes]

Hi @Meegies

I am assuming you are using a version from the 20xx.x series, this would certainly be using the same details as @Stuart_W mentioned. The report is hard-coded to work as is and we cannot change the behaviour.

I will mention that this is a change from the v19 software, as this does work as you describe where the difference is shown in positive for money saved and negative for going over budget.

I have noted these details down and have submitted them to the Product Team as feedback.

At current, the only workaround I can suggest is to export this to Excel to adjust as you wish to review it.

[Meegies]

Hi @Haydes

Yes, we're using AccountRight Live, now. 

Thanks for passing this on. It would be nice to have the option for how things are displayed. Especially considering that MYOB is designed for laymen, for it to produce reports that put a positive outcome as a negative figure doesn't work well with that demographic.

I'll consider the Excel option.

Thanks for your time.