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Cost accounting and budgets

This set of two screens allows you to track your accounts by cost centre (analytical section: branch, activity, project) and to compare a forecast budget with actual figures, month by month. You create sections, allocate your entries to them, then view the results by section; at the same time, you enter a budget for each account and monitor the variance against actual figures.

What it is for

General accounting provides an overall result, but a manager often needs to know which branch, which activity or which project is profitable. Cost accounting meets this need: you create sections (for example, ‘Paris Branch’, ‘Lyon Branch’) and then assign each entry (either at the time of entry or retrospectively) to a section. The ‘Results by Section’ screen then totals income and expenditure by section over a selected period, and isolates any items that have not been allocated. Budgets complement this analysis over time: for an account or account prefix (for example, 607 for all purchases of goods), you enter a forecast amount spread over the 12 months of the year (with a shortcut to spread it evenly from January), which may be linked to a cost centre. The monitoring function then displays, month by month, the forecast, the actual figure and the variance in euros and as a percentage, enabling you to quickly spot any deviations.