two year comparison - Budget Vs. actual annual budget report

Hi there, 

QuickBooks Online Plus has an easy-to-navigate budgeting feature. Budgets help you plan ahead so you can stay on top of your expenses and revenue. After you set one up, using the Budget vs. Actuals report can help you make informed decisions for your business.

To find the report, click the Reports tab on the left navigation menu, then search for Budget vs. Actuals Report. Once you've opened the report, you can begin customizing it to suit your needs. 

You can absolutely select a reporting period of over one year. To do that, enter the start and end dates at the top of the page where it says Reporting Period. You can then click the Customize button at the top right side of the page to adjust the way your rows and columns are displayed. You can select Accounts vs. Months, Accounts vs. Qtrs, or Accounts vs. Total. 

The options to customize the columns further are limited. I think having the option to separate totals by year is a great idea. You can do this manually by running a report to display Accounts vs. Total for a one-year Reporting Period. I'd be happy to submit your feedback about this to our engineering team for review. We're always looking for new ways to improve our products. 

For more information about the Budgets feature and it's reports, take a look at this helpful Community article: Create, edit, and manage budgets.

I hope this helps clear things up for you.

Cheers.

OK Thanks you,

Yes being able to compare years like this is so very useful to us.  And like I said it was easy to do on the desktop version.  I am disappointed this cant be done without running two separate reports in this online version.

I'm looking for that same ability. Have there been any updates?

I would also like to run a 2 year comparison of P&L budget vs actual report.  Can this be done?

Thanks to everyone who has contributed to this thread with your feedback. I'd be happy to pass this along to my team for consideration!

As for running a two year comparison of your P&L, the process works similarly to the Budget vs. Actuals report. While the system won't display a comparison side-by-side, you can run the report for one year, then screenshot the page or print it out. After that, change the date-range to display the second year you'd like to compare it with. That way you'll be able to see both years side-by-side. 

I know this isn't the exact workaround you were hoping for. I'd recommend submitting feedback on your end as well by clicking the Gear icon > Feedback. 

If you need any further assistance, please reach out to our tech support team.

Cheers. 

 

The major shortcoming of this solution (for us, at least) is that our list of active accounts changes from year to year, sometimes substantially. Any manually pieced together comparison between two years needs to involve painstaking work to line up all the accounts. That's the sort of unwieldy task that software should be designed to automate.

I've been searching for a solution for a Budget vs Actual with Prior Year Comparison and shocked to learn that this issue has been documented as a problem for years.  Shame on QB for not fixing this. This past year we have run into multiple issues with customer service and other problems.  Time to switch software!

Hi Jenn4505,

I can see how being able to compare reports for prior years to current would be helpful and a great way to save time. I can help go over how to request this feature be added.

In order to request a feature is added in future updates you would need to send the request to our development team. The only way to do that is by submitting feedback through your QuickBooks Online account. You can do this by following these steps. 

1. Select the Gear icon at the top, then Feedback.
2. Enter your comments or product suggestions. Then select Next to submit feedback.

Once the feedback is submitted it'll go straight to our development team so they can look into ways to add it. In the meantime you can also export your reports to excel to modify to see the information you're looking for. You can export to excel by following the steps in this article.

If you have any further questions don't hesitate to reach out and we would be happy to help!