Financial Reporter Overview

Sage ERP Accpac General Ledger 6.0

Financial Reporter Overview

The Financial Reporter is a spreadsheet add-in program that uses Microsoft Excel to read and print General Ledger data.

Financial statements are spreadsheets that use special Sage ERP Accpac functions to extract data from the Sage ERP Accpac accounting database.

Financial Statement Designer starts Microsoft Excel

Whenever you choose the Statement Designer from Sage ERP Accpac (to create or edit a financial statement), Excel (with the Financial Reporter add-in) starts automatically.

It is important to remember that this spreadsheet add-in is available only when you start Excel from the Statement Designer icon.

Note also that Microsoft Excel is not shipped with Sage ERP Accpac General Ledger. If you want to use Excel to create financial statements, you must purchase it separately.

To print a Financial Report

Key Financial Reporter Concepts

The Financial Reporter is based upon a few, simple concepts:

  • A financial report is a spreadsheet containing functions that read data directly from General Ledger.

You can place Financial Reporter functions anywhere in a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet program looks up the General Ledger values when it recalculates the spreadsheet.

You can also use any other spreadsheet functions you want to further manipulate that data.

  • A financial statement specification is a structured description of the statement you want to produce. Financial Reporter creates a statement based on the specification and the options you choose when you want to print or view the final statement.

Statement specifications allow you to assign default functions and formulas to columns of the spreadsheet, and to specify that a range of accounts will be expanded to many rows on a final statement.

Statement specifications make statements easier to create and more flexible, but you don't have to use them.

  • Financial Reporter lets you choose and restrict data at print time by account segment range, account group, fiscal period, and by fiscal set (actual or provisional amounts).

Keep in mind when designing statements that a generalized financial statement can be printed with the actual or provisionally-posted amounts of any particular department or division.

  • If you are including rollup accounts, be sure you designed the rollup group in such a way that you do not end up with doubled amounts in the report.