Help me get started on a financial report

[dsable]

I need a little direction in getting started on this report.

I am working on a report where, across the columns we have our field offices (each field office is a unique business unit). Down the rows is the object accounts summed to level of detail 4. Is there an easy way to do this? Is there a smart field that I could use to do this kind of summarization for me? I do develop reports and have been exposed to tabular/smart field reports but I can't say I fully understand them. If you could give me some basic direction, that would be helpful.

-Dave

Field Office Uganda Vietnam Alaska
Beginning Balance xx.xx xx.xx xx.xx
Contributions xx.xx xx.xx xx.xx
Investment Income xx.xx xx.xx xx.xx
Total Income xx.xx xx.xx xx.xx
Transfers xx.xx xx.xx xx.xx
Direct assist to others xx.xx xx.xx xx.xx
Direct Project Cost xx.xx xx.xx xx.xx
…
Other xx.xx xx.xx xx.xx
Total Expense xx.xx xx.xx xx.xx

Ending Balance xx.xx xx.xx xx.xx
Change in Balance xx.xx xx.xx xx.xx

 

[David Tremain]

I'm not sure your request gives enough detail to be able to help you a lot.

Financial Reporting depends a lot on your G/L account setup (for newbies - take this to mean that it is critical that you spend the time up front to design your G/L account structure so it will give you the results you need).

Smartfields are, in some sense, an object that shows its results as a field on the report. Smartfields encapsulate logic and conditionals to determine its result (which shows on the report). Think of it as a subroutine or function with a single output value.

Your description sounds like summary level 4 is appropriate.

Finance reports are by definition rows of accounts/branch plants and columns of accounting periods. The tool doesn't do it any other way.

You are probably looking at doing a Financial Row Report, which is based on data selection for Company and Business Unit. The Financial Report is a tabular report, which does totalling and things for you automatically, but affords you a lot less control over the report.

Use the wizard (new report), select Application Reports (Financial Report) in the drop-down. (This is the tab report). The wizard allows you to select smart field types to include on the report (e.g., period activity). For each field, you can change its internal name (to make it unique) and set its column heading. In addition, it permits you to set the smart field's parameters (period and fiscal year) *as* adjustments from current period and fiscal year. So, to add the current period activity, you would leave the smart field parameters blank. To see the previous period's value, set period parameter to -1 and leave the FY parameer blank. To see the current period's value in the previous FY, leave period parameter blank, set fiscal year parameter to -1. The wizard also asks for Level of Detail, which controls totaling levels.

You may need to experiment with a couple of test reports to get the hang of it, but it isn't too bad...

The difference in the Finance Row Report is that you generate the rows after the wizard is finished (and the wizard does not ask about levels of detail). In RDA, choose Row; Automatic Row Generation. In the resulting dialog, in the Account Level of Detail there is a Totals checkbox. If you check that, it will automatically include a totals row for the generated rows. It looks like you would generate rows for each Branch Plant you wanted on the report.

With a row report, you can control things on a row by row basis - including accounts, etc. The reports are often tedious to create (and maintain). Large financial reports can take a long time to run (depending on your system).

Obviously, I'm no genius, and it has been a while since I've done any financial reporting, but hope this at least is enough to get you started...

Wishing Samaritan's Purse all the best...