Volunteer Training - Society/Technical Council Finances-Financial Reports: How to Read the Summary Report

The Summary Report summarizes the overall profit and loss (P&L) of the Society. The Summary Report is a “Management Report” that:

• shows Income, Expense & Net by major category;
• reports each month year-to-date (YTD) Actual vs. Budget;
• shows Net Variance Actual vs. Budget.

The YTD information in the Summary Report is organized into three groups:

• Income (outlined in green for emphasis in this example)
• Expenses (outlined in red for emphasis in this example)
• Net Surplus or Deficit (outlined in blue for emphasis in this example)

For Income and Expenses, the Summary Report provides the annual budget number, the year to date budget number and the year to date actual number in thousands of dollars (i.e., 542.1 = $542,100).  Net Surplus has a fourth number: Variance (budget-actual). These numbers are reported for each major source.  The sources are in the far lefthand column.  Each column is totalled at the bottom of the sheet.  Therefore, by reading across the Periodicals row to the YTD Budget and Actual columns (indicated by green arrows) you can see information like the YTD actual income from periodicals (411.8) vs the budgeted income (542.1) .  This information can help you identify underperforming sources or expenses that have exceeded the budgets.

To see the net (income - expense) summarized, use the far righthand group of columns under Net Surplus (Deficit).  For each source, you will be able to see whether your S/C is on track or not and identify potential issues and devise solutions.  In this example, you can see that Meetings and Conferences are generating more money than budgeted (as indicated by blue arrows) --YTD Net Budget was 204.4, but actual was 258.5, for a net variance of 54.1.  The overall total can be seen in the bottom row of these three columns circled in orange).  In this case, we see the YTD variance is -16.8. meaning that the Society is unfavorable to budget by $16,800 at the time this report was issued.

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