Defining Financial Summaries - Nominal

On the Professional,Diamond and Premier product ranges you can design up to 40 financial summaries such as profit and loss statements, balance sheets, funds flow and other management reports. These are designed almost entirely to your own specification.Compact users are restricted to 2 financial summaries predefined as a profit and loss statement and a balance sheet – you can amend these layouts though.

There are two styles of summary: the "easy mode” report which you can design and change at run time, and "full mode” reports which give greater control over what is printed and has more powerful features.

Easy Mode Financial Summaries

These let you design reports which list, sub-total and total groups of nominal codes. The difference between this and a conventional report is that you can select and print groups in the order which suits the report, not just in strict account code sequence. In addition you can include report lines which are in fact calculations and ratios based on previous sub-totals in the report. This lets you design financial summaries which would be beyond the scope of conventional report writers such as DataFiler.

You create or change the design of these summaries at the time you run the report. This allows you to prepare quick ad hoc summaries to meet specific reporting needs.

You can define up to six columns of values to print on the financial summary in Compact and Professional, 12 columns in Diamond and up to 20 columns in Premier.In addition to printing current balances, therefore, you can print start-of-period or start-of-year balances, movement figures, budget figures or comparative figures on the same report.

Full Mode Financial Summaries (excluding Compact)

Each full mode financial summary is limited to a single page. However, at run time you may request to print several summaries one after another, effectively producing a multi-page summary.

Each document can hold up to 132 lines of printed information and up to 255 characters can be printed across the page. As with easy mode summaries, you can define up to twenty columns of values, subject to product level, to print on each report depending on the product level.

Powerful calculation facilities exist so that you can group together many account codes into one figure for printing. In addition you can include report lines which are in fact calculations and ratios based on the values in previous lines of the report. A "wildcard” facility allows you to define a financial summary which can be used either for the company as a whole, or to consolidate divisions, or group together cost centres, or print individual branch results, depending only on a question at run time.

Before you start to design the financial summaries you should plan the layout of the documents and the information that each one is to show. You can amend the specification later, but good preparation simplifies the subsequent definition.

Managing the Definition File

For easy mode financial summaries you are asked whether you want to change the definition details at the time you select the report from the menu. If you want to design or amend full mode financial summaries, or change between full and easy mode, or make the definition file larger, then you must access the financial summary definition procedures. You do this from the financial summaries menu by pressing the <F7-Option> key. This opens the definition file which holds the details of all the financial summaries, giving you the messages below.

Note

Now press <Enter> to display the financial summaries menu so that you can choose which definition you wish to amend from the list given to you. Any financial summary which has already been designed is given with its menu name, as shown below. Any summary in the definition file which has yet to be defined shows with a name of "spare” or is blank.

All 40 financial summaries are shown, even though your definition file may be smaller. The additional ones are shown as "not allocated”.

You have a number of choices here:

Choose the number of an existing or spare financial journal so that you can go and modify or create a new summary definition.

Press <Escape> to return to the Financial Summaries menu

Type ‘COPY’ so that you can copy one financial summary definition to another in the file. This is helpful where you have similar summaries to define. The system then asks for the number of the one you want to copy, the number of the one to copy to (which must be within the current definition file size) and then checks that you are sure before performing the copy

Enter the number of one of the "not allocated” transactions. You are then asked if you wish to expand the file. This is a simple way to create additional space in the definition file for more financial summaries

Choosing one of the menu options then puts you into the financial summary menu title field (see the example menu screen above) so that you can change the title if you wish.Note that if you blank out the title, then effectively you clear that financial summary from the menu. When you confirm the title you are prompted:

If you want to change the specification of the summary, then reply ‘Yes’, otherwise reply ‘No’ to return to the "Update Which Summary” prompt. From this point on the procedures are different for full mode and easy mode financial summaries. You should now refer to the appropriate section below.