Comm-tech Management Accounts Template (MAST)

What is it?

The trustees of our organisation wanted a regular progress report on how we’re doing against the budget forecast. As we don’t use any of the big accounts software packages we decided to create our own way of producing information which is both easy for a busy manager to put together and also provides enough information for the trustees to know how we’re doing.

The Spreadsheet

  • Download it here (Openoffice Template)
  • Download it here (Excel Template)

    This spreadsheet is not the annual accounts its simply a working document prepared from our bank statements for each month. We don’t look at accruals and prepayments we simply budget forecast a monthly figure for some items like electricity which actually come out once during the quarter. Insurance and prepayments are treated the same way in that in the budget forecast they are broken down into 12 monthly installments but will come out during a particular month. We simply write an explanation in a brief sentence for these variances in an attached document. We find it far easy to enclose a single sheet of comments about what is happening rather than creating a bunch of additional breakdowns on the spreadsheet information to explain any changes from the forecast. Here's an example

    How to use the template

    Do NOT fill in any of the totals boxes or the variance column Put your budget forecast figures in forecast Put your bank statement figures in Actual Leave any boxes not used blank

    That’s it. The total fields and the variances should do themselves.

    What about accuracy?

    We’re not a multi-national and therefore small variances won’t have much of an impact, even cumulatively. This is a very simple tool that provides a broad-brush overview of how things are going with the minimum of effort. The small table at the bottom can be quickly compared with the bank balance and progress assessed on the basis of knowing the direction we’re going in.

    Feedback

    Please feel free to tinker and add to the sheet and let us know if you found it useful or if there’s anything we can add to it. Please keep in mind that the main things we were trying to achieve is:
  • easy and quick entry
  • non-professional understanding of the information presented
  • uncluttered printout for each quarter.