Monitor Your Financial Progress During the Month
A big advantage to using RFMS, a fully integrated business management system, is access to accurate real-time financial information. On concluding your end of month processes, you will have a financial result, not just for the month gone by, but year to date, and comparisons to last year.
If you are using RFMS for financial reporting, you know this already. What you might not know is you can access this information during the month. Maybe two weeks into the month you want to see how the business is travelling, or maybe closer to the end of the month you want to get an indication of how the month has gone.
You can do that; run a preliminary profit and loss any time during the month.
Go to Accounting > File > General Ledger > General Ledger functions to be returned with this screen:
Click on the Journal Close button, and then the Preliminary Journal Close button:
Notice the month in the top left hand corner; it defaults to the month you are currently in i.e. the period that is not yet closed. Click OK, and click on Preliminary Profit and Loss:
In the following window, choose Report Type (in this example Single Month). You can elect to combine stores or run the report on a single store, or combination of stores. Check the Print Preview box; when you have the report on screen, you can save to PDF, or print. Note also that you can export the data to a .csv file (Excel).
Please note:
When you have finished, and you are back at the following screen, click Abort Journal Close:
Running this process in the course of the month, not only gives you an indication of how well the business is progressing to achieve budget, but it also gives you insight as to whether or not the various processes within your business are being completed in a timely fashion. If midway through the month the numbers appear to be off, it could be jobs are not being costed, or creditors not being posted; indicating that this work is piling up to be completed in a rush at the end of the month.
RFMS recommended best practice is that, as far as reasonably possible, work that hits the desk today is completed in RFMS today. If this practice is observed in your business, you will be able to get meaningful financial information at any stage in the month, and it means your staff are not put in the position where they must process a backlog in the final days of the month.
Let us know if we can help you take advantage of accessing Preliminary Profit and Loss reporting.