The General Ledger Financial Reporter lets you design and print custom financial reports tailored to your chart of accounts. You can access it from Setups, General Ledger, Financial Reporter, Setup and Print.

To begin setting up your report, choose how you want to create the report layout.

Each report can be set up to print for dynamic (current) accounting periods or for a static (specific) period. A dynamic period reflects whatever the period is in General Ledger at the time of printing.

The Report Period task area has two period selections — Current or Specific — which control the accounting period at the time of printing.

This area contains the financial elements you can use to construct the report. You can have up to 16 columns across the page.

Each account is set up with a column number in Account Maintenance – Report Format. Your chart may have posting accounts in the first column, subtotal accounts in the second, and total accounts in the third.

The Period field gives you the flexibility to create a wide range of reports. Use Find (F2) to display the full list of available choices.

Dynamic period selections (used by the majority of reports):

Static period selections (not used often; mainly for reports such as the budget list):

Enter the maximum width this field is likely to require. If you have not allowed enough room for financial figures, question marks will print where the field overflows the width set; alpha characters will truncate. The column width also determines the heading width.

The program allows for two-line column headings, where each line is as wide as the column width previously entered. You can enter the heading on either the first or second line.

Wherever you type the @ character in the heading column, Financial Reporter automatically inserts the period name for the period selected in the Prd column. The name displays in red. This saves you having to type in the relevant period name each time the current period changes.

Example — if the current period is September:

The Report Headers tab defaults to the company name and details from Company Options. You can change these if required.

Example:

Figures can be rounded to whole dollars or thousands of dollars. When rounding is selected, each account is rounded individually, which means there may be a variance between the two accounts in the Balance Sheet that must balance (e.g. Net Assets and Total Equity).

To manage this:

Use the Check Chart Structure option in Financial Reporter to verify your chart and account setup after you have designed and saved your report layout. This shows what your report will look like and checks whether accounts are adding down the chart correctly, printing in the right columns, with correct underlines, spacing, indents, and report groups.

If you have last year figures in your system, a warning message displays if you have made changes to any current account details that will affect last year account details. You can choose not to display this warning message each time you print a report that includes these account details. Refer to the Online Help for a detailed list of changes that produce a warning message.

Print to either a printer, screen, or disk file. Choose the margins, the orientation (landscape or portrait), and whether to use the High Speed Print option (if it has been purchased).

This tutorial demonstrates using dynamic period selections to create a budget variance report.

This tutorial demonstrates using dynamic period selections to report on the last 12 months.

The current period changes according to what the current period is in GL Options at the time of printing. The last 12 months will be different each time this report is printed for a new current period.

This tutorial demonstrates static period selections. Regardless of what the current period is at the time of printing, this report always prints budget figures for the periods selected. Whatever is selected in the Report Period box is ignored.

The Import and Export utilities allow you to copy report layouts from one user to another. Each user can set up their own library of up to 100 report layouts that can be shared with other users.

Import Reports and Export Reports are located in the Setups, General Ledger, Financial Reporter menu. Users can import or export default report layouts that are copied to the \attache\reports\GL directory.