Financial Summaries - Nominal

Financial summaries are the special management reports that show, amongst other things, the profitability or otherwise of the company. You use this part of the nominal ledger to produce such reports as the profit and loss statement, balance sheet, and funds flow statements, plus any other analyses or reports you want to define. You can print these reports whenever you like — and indeed for any period you like from both the current year or from the previous year.

Financial summaries can either be "easy mode” reports which you can define very quickly at the time, or "full mode” reports which give you greater control over the report format and complexity but need a bit more time to plan and implement. These reports are entirely user-defined, and you may create up to 40 such summaries for any one company, using the facilities described later in this section.

Compact Systems

Taking this option shows you the menu of summaries you have defined so far. The following is an example.

Note

You have three choices here:

You can select one of the reports to print

You can key <F4-Select> to pick several reports to print together

You can use the <F7–Options> key to go to the report definition procedure

The reporting procedures are the same for the first two options (once you’ve selected which reports to run together for the second). These are described together below.

Running Several Reports Together

If you press <F4-Select> to run several reports together, then you can scroll up/down the list of reports using the <INSERT> key to select a summary to print and <DELETE> to de-select a summary from printing. Use the <ESC> key once you are happy with your selection.

Reporting Procedure

After selecting the financial summary to print then firstly, if the selected summary is an ‘easy mode’ definition, you are asked if you wish to change any details.

If you don’t want to change the design, then reply ‘No’. If you reply ‘Yes’ you go into the easy mode report definition process, which is described at the end of this section. Once you’ve changed the design you return to this point.

A series of print parameters are displayed.

Report "as at” Period Number

The nominal ledger keeps all the current year’s periods open, and all the previous year’s periods can still be viewed. Here you give the period number for which you want this report to print. It then takes the values "as at” the end of that period.

Enter either a current year period, or — if you want to print a report on one of the previous year’s periods — prefix the period number with P. So "P10” would print a report based on the values at the end of the tenth period of last year.

Confirm Dates – Report Date / Period From / Period To

These dates do not affect the operation of the report; they are there only to print in the report heading for information. Today’s date is offered in the first prompt, and the period start and end dates are those which were used the last time a financial summary was printed. Typically the Period From date is used to give the start of the financial year or period, and the Period To date the end of the current period. How these dates are used on the report is defined by the financial summary specification.

In fact these are all text fields up to 30 characters in length, so you could use them for any purpose.You could type dates in the format "31st July 20xx” for example; this can improve the look of the final printed summary.

Print Account Codes in Report

This prompt only occurs for easy mode financial summaries. If you reply Y then account codes are printed against report lines as well as account names.If you reply N then only the names print. See the sample reports at the end of this section for examples of each one.

Comment to be Printed

You can design full mode financial summaries to print a comment on the report to highlight some special aspect — for example "Prior to stock-take”, "Excludes service department” and so on. If you use this option, then the comment you want to print on this report is entered here.This comment can be up to 40 characters in length.

After confirming these details you are asked for the print device to output to, select as required.

Run-Time Selection (Full Mode Only)

For a ‘full mode’ financial summary you may be asked to select an additional selection before the report is printed.

A very powerful feature, it allows you to run full mode financial summaries against some selection options. In effect you can run the same summary against the whole nominal ledger, or for just certain cost centres or departments (say).

For example, suppose you have fifteen branches in your company, each with their own similar chart of accounts in the nominal ledger and with the branch code included as part of the nominal code. This option allows you to define a single financial summary and print it in any of the following ways:

Print as Specified — This is the standard option, which prints a single financial summary as specified by the definition

Page per Selection Entered — this lets you enter the codes for one or more branches (in fact you can enter a maximum of 100 codes in this option). A financial summary is printed for each branch code entered, which includes only the details for that branch. If your financial summary definition is for a profit and loss statement (say) then this option gives you a profit and loss statement for each branch whose code is entered here

In fact you are offered the nominal account code with the branch code (in this case) set to asterisks. You overtype the asterisks with the branch code you want to include. For example, if your code structure were 99.999, where the first two digits were the branch code, then you are offered "**.999” as the code, and you overtype the asterisks with 01 for branch 01, and so on

To complete the list of codes, use the <F3–Clear> key to make the code blank and <Enter>. The number of codes entered so far is shown during this process

Single Page of Listed Selection — you would use this to produce a financial summary which consolidated a number of branches into one report — this would give you a report on a sales region, say. Again you can enter up to 100 nominal codes here in the same way as described above. All the codes for these branches are consolidated into a single report

Single Page with Exception Selection — this produces a financial summary which consolidates all branches except those whose codes you enter here. You might use this to exclude head office costs and so give a trading profitability report for the operations side of the business

Sample ‘Easy Mode’ Profit & Loss Statement

Sample ‘Easy Mode’ Balance Sheet

Sample ‘Full Mode’ Profit & Loss Statement

Sample ‘Full Mode’ Balance Sheet