How to Use Scribe for Your Explanation of Variances

When managing council finances, explaining variances between different financial years is crucial to ensure accuracy and transparency in your accounting. Scribe Accounts provides reporting tools to help you analyse and explain these differences effectively. Here's a step-by-step guide on how to use these tools, particularly if you have more than one year of accounts on Scribe Accounts.

1. Accessing Yearly Comparison Reports

To begin, you should generate comparison reports for different financial years. Here’s how to access these reports:

• Navigate to Summary Reports → CC Yr Comparison (Cost Centre Year Comparison).
  This report provides a side-by-side comparison of payments and receipts for the current and previous financial years across different cost centres. This overview helps identify significant changes in specific cost code lines.

2. Reviewing Detailed Transactions

After identifying the areas with notable variances, you should review the transactions contributing to these differences:

• Navigate to Summary Reports → Detailed Cost Centre.
  This report details every transaction allocated to each cost code. You can produce this report for both the current and previous years to perform a detailed comparison. This step is essential to understand the underlying transactions that explain the variances.

3. Comparing with Previous Accounting Systems

If this is your first year using Scribe Accounts, you will need to compare the generated reports with those from your previous accounting system:

• Generate the Cost Centre Year Comparison and Detailed Cost Centre reports as described above.
• Obtain similar reports from your previous accounting system that detail the financial activities per cost centre.
• Manually compare these reports to understand discrepancies or changes in financial handling.

4. Verifying Annual Return Boxes

To ensure the accuracy of your Annual Governance and Accountability Return (AGAR), it is advisable to verify the breakdown of transactions feeding into each box of the return:

• Navigate to Year End → Annual Return

You can then view a breakdown of boxes 3, 4, 5 & 6 by selecting the 'Filter' button just above the report. Select the relevant option from the drop-down and 'View Report' to see the full breakdown.

Summary

Utilising the Cost Centre Year Comparison and Detailed Cost Centre reports in Scribe Accounts effectively allows council clerks and Responsible Financial Officers (RFOs) to not only track financial changes over the years but also to provide clear explanations for these variances. These reports are essential tools for maintaining transparency and accuracy in council finances, aiding in both internal audits and public accountability.