Export Bank Transactions for Budgeting

1

I want to export all bank transactions (income and expenses) for my business year. I need to have this export show the account number.

I want to create a budget worksheet that shows each account summary by month for the previous year.

Then I will create a monthly Budget Performance Report that will show budget, actual, variance, % by month and year-to-date for each account.

Is there a way to export all income and expense transactions with account codes? I can see how to do this for a month but not for a fiscal year. I don’t want to export 12 times and manually try to match up the exported data.

I have been using Manager for a few months and love your product. I am aware of your new budget feature but I suggest that a budget must be by account by month so the actual can be compared on a monthly basis. I don’t think an annual budget is useful.

Thank you
Steve Burroughs
Georgia, USA

2

The current budget feature allows you to specify your own date range, so you can do twelve of them, one for each month, if you wish. But this will not separate them by account.

Personally, I’m using it to track a budget over an entire year, and find it helpful. Just wanted to point out that the annual budget is useful for some people, even if it’s not in your particular situation.

3

Where are you looking?
Generally if you can select a month period you should also be able to select a year.

However, if you create the Report - General Ledger Transactions, then you can specify your dates and “export” via the button at the base of the report.

4

Export from the Bank Transactions tab listing. This will export all bank transactions, but you can edit in the spreadsheet. Or you can narrow the list by searching on a year, e. g. 2017.

If you are referring to bank account numbers, that is not a field stored by Manager unless you create a custom field. However, you can enter the account number as part of the name of the account and it will then show under Bank Account.

It goes without saying that you would be doing this in a spreadsheet. You can export as described above from Bank Transactions, then manipulate data in the spreadsheet. Or you can create General Ledger Transaction reports as @Brucanna suggested and export them. The date range can be anything you specify.

5

By account numbers I think that they were referring to account names such that if a bank transaction had three account lines then each line would be exported so they could be re-sorted by account in the spreadsheet.

6

Thanks everyone for your responses and advice. Sorry for the delay, I haven’t had a chance to work on this until this evening.

Here is an example of what I plan to do. First image is the Budget example and the second one is the Monthly Budget Performance Report: (all the data is just made up stuff for an example)

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I want to export all transactions with a general ledger account for my fiscal year. Then I will add transactions that zero non-recurring items, and add transactions that project new planned items. This budget transaction file will be an audit trail for the budget preparation and show all changes and notes. This will give me the Budget file. Then on a monthly basis at the close of each month, I will prepare a Budget Performance Report showing budget vs. actual for all income and expense accounts. I will also create a graph of this.

I will probably do this mostly with MS Access, though it would be nice if Manager could do this.

I really would like to have my general ledger number with the transactions but I don’t know how to get them.

Please let me know if I am missing something. I am somewhat new to Manager but I do like it for general accounting for my non-profit homeowner association for which I am the treasurer.

Thanks again.

7

What exactly do you mean? Every transaction appears in the general ledger.

Please explain this.

You can get this by defining appropriate dates for a P&L Statement (Actual vs. Budget) under Reports. Do monthly and annual-to-date reports.

What are you referring to?

8

Hi Tut,

Thanks for the prompt reply. I will try to better explain and answer your
questions.

treasure47:

I want to export all transactions with a general ledger account for my
fiscal year.

What exactly do you mean? Every transaction appears in the general ledger.

Yes, all transactions are in the GL, but I don’t want to to have to create
the budget for each account manually by running 12 reports and entering a
budget amount for each account manually and maybe not remembering a month
from now how I established the budget for an account. .

Also, for example, we spent $1,000 for a new pool cleaner machine. We want
to zero that transaction so it will reduce the budget for that month for
that item as we won’t buy another machine for years. So, I want to create
a transaction to zero (reverse the amount) of the original transaction and
have a note on this new transaction explaining why the transaction was
created.(non-recurring expense).

Also, I might add a transaction for a new planned expenditure, like a new
gate for the boat yard in June. Again, is would be documented in the
transaction file.

treasure47:

I will add transactions that zero non-recurring items

Please explain this.

I think I described the above.

treasure47:

Then on a monthly basis at the close of each month, I will prepare a Budget
Performance Report showing budget vs. actual for all income and expense
accounts.

You can get this by defining appropriate dates for a P&L Statement (Actual
vs. Budget) under Reports. Do monthly and annual-to-date reports.

I understand that once I have defined a budget, I can run one report for
current month and another for year-to-date. I would like one report that
shows current month and year-to-date so there is one place to look for
budget status of the account. I tend to look at year-to-date variance and
if significant (maybe greater than 5%), I then look at the month’s figures
for the account to understand why.

treasure47:

I really would like to have my general ledger number with the transactions

What are you referring to?

The GL transactions do not show the GL account number. I may compare other
items regarding the account and the number is the key identifier for the
account for me. I think it is easier to reference the numbers that
descriptions, many of which may have similar text in their descriptions.

My main concern is the amount of work required to create the budget. If
you are creating a budget from scratch, you would have to do this.
However, I plan to use the previous year’s actual items adjusted as
necessary to create the new year’s budget. It would take me many tedious
hours to do this manually.

Many thanks again for getting back. I am not criticizing Manager but I
need an easier process than the budget feature you currently have.

Your advice is greatly appreciated.

9

Thanks for the additional explanation. In general, you are a victim of the primitive state of budgeting in Manager. The developer has promised further development, but no schedule has been announced.

You were not clear about whether you hoped to do this in Manager or an outside spreadsheet. But understand that any such transaction entered into Manager will affect your books permanently. The approach for budgeting purposes should be to edit any budgeted amount that was based on exported or past transactions, not enter a transaction to remove it.

True, but if you are using account codes, they show on the P&L (Actual vs Budget) report.

Fundamentally, you are asking for features for your specific work flow and display/analysis preferences. While there are certainly potential improvements to be made in the budgeting feature, I don’t think you are ever going to get exactly what you want in general accounting software, especially not at the price of Manager.

10

Hi Tut,

Just some thoughts to share.

I was thinking about putting copying all transactions to a budget work
file, certainly never to change the original archival file. The sorting
the transactions by amount and GL code. This would help in determining
which specific transactions are non-recurring which would usually be
significantly larger amounts. The smaller amounts, even if non-recurring
won’t greatly affect the budget. You need a starting point and rather
than trying to rely on memory, It should be beneficial to review actual
transactions. In my case, I already know most of these but I don’t recall
the period when they occurred or the exact amount. I like data based
decisions rather than guesses. I need to remove non-recurring items from
the period (month) in which they occurred so the month’s budget will be
more accurate. .

I do want to say again how much I like your product. I have tried Quicken
and quickly abandoned it.

I appreciate all you do.

11

Well, thanks for the kind words. But it isn’t my product. I’m just a forum moderator and have nothing to do with development.