Budget vs actual reporting for US businesses

A named person on our team owns your file and reviews everything that leaves it. Software does a real share of the grinding underneath it — coding, matching, flagging the obvious gaps — but nothing regulated happens without a person’s judgement, and nothing here is signed or filed by an algorithm.

No — budget vs actual reporting is operational work inside your books, not something submitted to IRS. Where a filing does sit downstream of it, inside financial reporting more broadly, that stays with your CPA or enrolled agent, never with us.

Whatever you already run. Most commonly QuickBooks, Xero, NetSuite, Sage, Zoho Books and a handful of others — we work inside your system rather than moving you onto one of our own.

A short, free read-only look at what you already have, and a written note on what we found. A scoping call decides the size of the engagement — nothing here commits you to anything.

There is no published price for budget vs actual reporting — it depends on volume, how many entities are involved, and how far behind the books are. We quote after the read-only review, which is free.

Budget vs actual reporting sits inside financial reporting, alongside Management accounts, Year-end preparation, Board and investor reporting. Most clients end up buying the category as a whole rather than one leaf at a time, but starting narrow is fine.

A P&L shows what happened. A BvA report shows what happened against what was expected, line by line, with a written reason for every material gap. That reason — not the percentage itself — is what lets a manager decide whether to act.

No. We phase the budget by month against known seasonality and known changes — a hire date, a price increase, a contract renewal — so the monthly baseline reflects what was actually expected to happen that month, not an even split of an annual figure.

A documented threshold, set at engagement start, in both dollars and percentage. Any line crossing either gets a plain-language explanation naming the driver. The threshold is fixed and applied the same way every month, not judged case by case.

A re-forecast is a rolling, forward-looking update to management's view of the rest of the year, based on what has actually happened — it does not change the original budget. A revision changes the budget baseline itself and is logged separately, with a reason, because the original baseline is what accountability is measured against.

No. A re-forecast is an internal planning number. It has no effect on what your CPA works from at year-end or files on the return — the actual recorded results stay exactly as recorded.

We build the budget into a phased, chart-of-accounts-aligned baseline and run the ongoing comparison against it, but the targets themselves — revenue goals, spending limits, hiring plans — are management's decisions. We turn those decisions into a baseline that can be tracked and explained, not the other way around.

We reconcile them to the same basis before the comparison means anything. A cash-basis budget compared to accrual-basis actuals produces a variance that reflects the basis mismatch, not real performance, so that gets fixed at setup rather than explained away every month.

Yes. We build the report to whatever cadence and layout the credit agreement specifies, and flag a threshold breach to you as soon as it shows up in a period's actuals, separate from the full monthly package.

It runs on the cadence set at engagement start, commonly quarterly for most businesses and monthly for ones with faster-moving numbers. The cadence is agreed once and held, so the re-forecast arrives on a schedule management can plan around.

AI flags which lines crossed the materiality threshold and pulls the prior-period and driver-level detail together so the explanation can be written quickly. The named accountable person on the engagement writes and stands behind the actual explanation and reviews the full package before it goes out — AI does not decide what the story behind a number is.