looking for monthly financial report design ideas xpns

Hi all,

I made a monthly financial report for my company, the report is pretty basic, as it needs to be, but I am looking for some ideas how to implement some features (both with macros or old-fashioned formulas) I have been considering, so I'd appreciate it if you would give me some ideas how to do it or suggestions for nice financial report templates.

One important feature I would like to make is to create/copy a new sheet for the new month that configures itself automatically to fit the month's days, so it would need to detect the current date and set the first day as the 1st of today's month and make it so that each date corresponds to its day of the week, so for example the 1st of November 2014 would be a Sunday, the 2nd a Monday and so on. I would also need the fail-safe option of manually setting the month of a sheet, so that if I need to make retrospective reports for a few months - I could do that.

I'd really like it to have some sort of chart that showcases the difference in expenses across all months and years, which I know how to do, I just would like some ideas for nice chart types, I went through several, but none are quite as handy as I'd like. More importantly I would like it to pick up similar expenses and show the total amount spent for such things, since I am already entering text strings for each expense, I really just need a good search function.


Thanks!

Can I do a selfish bump?

O-oh! I totally forgot to add an example file.

example.xlsx

There isn't a before and after sheet, as what i'm looking for is pretty basic. For example - in the workbook the "Template" sheet is the template I use for every month, I'd like it that whenever I copy the template it would automatically make itself like the sheet "November 2014", i.e. position its cells and dates accordingly to the current month and name itself.

Also I'd like it that on the "charts" sheet there is a way for the little summary of the expenses for each month to detect the biggest expenses and write them properly, like I have done manually now. I am also looking for a good chart to show yearly expenses and monthly expenses alltogether in a way that allows to easily see them both and compare year to year and month to month. I've looked at all the charts, but am stumped if this is even possible.


FDibbins, why would you question the need for such a sheet? Is it not common for most companies?
And it's the latter, that is what I am trying to achieve not.

I see how it is inefficient, but it is the way we have to do it.

Thank you for your example, it is sort of what I need, but Excel has to do it automatically - to search a given sheet and find the most common values and print them.

Have you thought about turning it on its head?

Why not have an ongoing working worksheet that you enter all the data on and then, in order to appease your company have that data automatically copied on to monthly tabs that you can give / present to management. It'll make your life a lot easier.