Chart budget vs actual

Laura Corredor

Hello, I have a sheet where I can see budget, actual and variance for my project budget. So column 1 is january budget, column 2 january actual and column 3 january variance, and so on.

All I want to is to create a line-type chart for my dashboard where I can see the comparison between the budget and actual numbers for every month, instead of seeing this for every line or account. So, one graph where x axis is months and y axis is amounts, one line is showing budget and other line is showing actuals. I have not found a way to do so, because reports don´t let me select the columns I want to use for the graph; budget columns are separated, actual columns and variance columns separated as well.

thanks for any help.

Debbie Sawyer

Hi Laura

Have you considered adjusting the way you are storing your data at all? If you had a column for Budgetted Amount, a column for Actual Amount and a column for Variance then a Column for a date then this would be easier to solve for you.

You could then set up some summary fields to SUM the Budgeted Amounts column for January and Actuals for Jan, then another two summaries for February etc and use a Summary report to feed the required data into a chart.

(I would lay this out in a couple of helper columns myself though - to make it easier to feed to the chart widget)

I would be more than happy to connect with you via Zoom to show you how to achieve this if that is useful? (FOC)

Kind regards

​Debbie Sawyer Consultant & Training Manager