Question about Budgets and Actuals

[pwalsh]

Hi,

My name is Paul, I am not an accountant, but I am looking for some professional input from accountants.

I am coding an open source web app for transparent publication of municipality and State budgets.

In designing the data model, we are trying to keep the implementation generic, and not tied to any one particular use case.

So, a question was raised about the relationship between Budgets and Actuals. Specifically, in a given case, should an Actual always map directly to a Budget?

I'll try to illustrate by example:

Let's say a given municipality (or corporation, or non-profit, or sole trader, etc.) wrote up the following budgets:

* 2009 Budget
* 2010 Budget
* 2011 Budget

Now, is it possible (read: does it ever happen in the real world) that the municipality (or corporation, etc. etc) could issue Actual reports that do not directly correspond to Budget Plans, for example, relating to above:

* 2009 - 2010 Actuals
* 2011 Actuals

Any feedback would be appreciated, thanks for your time.

Paul.

 

[accounting nerd]

It is most common to show a budget then show the results of that budget from a 1:1 viewpoint - i.e. 2009-2011 Budget vs. 2009-2011 actuals.

With that said, unless there are specific regulatory laws in your area, you can present budget and actual figures in any format you choose. However, it becomes easier as a reader to compare a 1:1 budget to actual data set.

 

[pwalsh]

Hi,

thanks for your help. It does seem that even though it would be an unusual use case, we should leave the system open enough to deal with one should it arise.