Cross cast

I have a feature request, could there be a cross cast report added to Manager? I don’t know if this is a standard accountant way of working, or whether it is something specific to either the UK, or just to our accountant, but basically he would like a report with the following columns, which is filled in for all transactions going in/out of the company:

  • Date
  • Customer/supplier
  • Reference number
  • Gross amount
  • VAT amount
  • Cost amount

The above are hopefully self explanatory. Then as well as the above columns, there is also one column for each of the income/expense categories (i.e. Software Sales, Lecturing Fees, Motoring Expenses, Postage, License Fees). Then at the bottom there is a total for each column (the columns containing numbers).

My accountant always uses a cross cast as it means on the P&L he can see that for example there has been 1,200.00 of telephone expenses, but with the cross cast he can scan up through the telephone expenses column and see all the transactions that make this up. He can ensure that there are no rogue (incorrectly categorized) transactions, and also ensure that VAT has been applied where required.

I appreciate that if my accountant used the software instead, he could find out all this information by clicking on various links, however he is an old fashioned accountant (born in 1940) and does everything either with pen and paper, or a straight forwards Excel spreadsheet. I have looked through the various reports currently available but I can’t find anything that does what my accountant wants.

It isn’t that my accountant suspects Manager is doing the wrong thing; it is more that he appreciates it is quite possible I have done the wrong thing when entering data into Manager (forgetting to select VAT @ 20%, or incorrect setting VAT @ 20% when it wasn’t due, or marking something as a normal expense when it should have been a fixed asset, etc.)

Does this sound like something you would be willing to add?

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Your accountant can easily click on all the amounts in the reports to drill down to individual transactions and ensure you have correctly classified the transactions and the Tax Audit report can be used to find incorrectly classified VAT transactions.

See: http://www.manager.io/guides/tax-codes/verifying-tax-amounts/

Whilst I appreciate the package makes these tasks rather easy to do, my accountant would like the data in a spreadsheet that he can print off to analyze. To be fair, just in the UK, if you like on HMRCs website, they recommend over 50 different accounting packages (to handle book keeping, p&l, VAT, etc.) so putting the onus on the accountant to use each of these different packages doesn’t seem completely fair.

As a thought, rather than generating a cross cast (which is perhaps seen as being somewhat specific), I thought I could generate this myself if I could get more of a ‘data dump’ from Manager. By this I mean a way to say between dates X and Y, write out all transactions (money going into/out of the company) to a TSV file (it could generate the same for the journal entries). If I had access to data in this form, I could fix the rest up in Excel.

Does this sound at all likely/possible for implementation?

I think the closest report to your suggestion is Tax Transactions report. Can you have a look at it and see what’s missing for your needs?