RSMUS.comDoes your nonprofit organization struggle to easily find your ending grant balances for a certain period? Do you need to compare restricted grant balances vs. unrestricted grant balances? Are you interested in seeing your organization’s change in departmental activity at the GL account level?
Using Sage Intacct’s Dimension Balance Report allows you to easily access this key data, with the added bonus of being able to customize each report to show precisely the numbers you need to see for funds and multi-year grants. By saving time on reporting, you can give your executives and board the accurate information they need more quickly, so they can make informed decisions.
Here’s a step-by-step guide to getting the most out of Intacct’s Dimension Balance Report:
Access the Report
In Intacct, the Dimension Balance Report can be accessed from the General Ledger menu from the Applications dropdown. Once you have the report open, you can customize it by choosing from the available options.
Select the Time Period
First, you’re going to want to choose the time period. If you’re looking at year-to-date activity, it’s recommended that you use the current year-to-date standard reporting period. Then run the report with a particular ending date, whether that’s the prior month end or as of today. For multi-year reporting, set the time period to cover the years you need to see.
Include All Needed Books
Once you’ve set up the time period, make sure you’re aware of any specific books that you might have in addition to accrual reporting. For example, if you’re trying to get more information, on say, departmental activity or grant balances, and you’re using the dynamic allocations module, you’ll need to include that book. If you’re using other books to track certain committed costs of encumbrances, make sure you include those in your report, as well. Choose the option that says “Select Additional Reporting Books” to add the ones you need.
Determine the GL Range
After you’ve selected the time period and included all the reporting books, you need to figure out which GL range to run the report for. Typically, if you want to run a report that includes carryover balances for funds or grants, you probably want to include the opening balances. In that case, you should include the full range of net asset accounts through all of your revenue and expense accounts as well. When you run the report on that whole range, you’ll get the opening balances from your net asset accounts and see the current year’s activity.
Apply Filters
When the range of GL accounts has been set, you’ll see a lot of options for filtering, which is where you can really start to hone in on the dimension values you want to track. If you want to look at a subset of grants or focus on a particular entity or department, you can filter for that. To see a breakdown on funds or grants with donor restrictions, assuming you have a dimension available for tracking by description, then include that filter.
Format the Report
In the format section, you can choose which dimensions you want to bring in as columns on your report by making selections in “Show Dimension Values.” For a report that shows an analysis of actual GL accounts, make sure to include a column that will display GL account balances broken out by the other levels you want to see, such as grant or department. If you aren’t interested in seeing the actual breakout of all revenue and expense accounts, you can leave off the GL account and the report will show a subtotal for each combination of dimensions.
Run the Report
When all your settings are in place, you can run the report. Once you have your Dimensions Balance Report, you can extract the numbers to Excel or save a copy of the report in the cloud. If the report is a useful display that you will come back to on a regular basis, you can use Intacct’s “memorize” button. After you memorize the report in Intacct, you can place it on your dashboard, where it will then adopt updated numbers for the dates you run your dashboard for.
Interested in learning more about how Sage Intacct’s advanced reporting capabilities can benefit your nonprofit organization? Schedule a call with one of the experts at RSM today.
