The Quick Report Writer
The quick report writer can be used to create basic financial statements including profit and loss and balance sheet reports for the year to date and current period, as well as various comparative reports such as last year versus this year and this year versus budget. CAPITAL GL Controller's quick report writer can produce six report varieties.
In order to be able to use the quick report writer, you must ensure that the account groupings set up in the financial formula table are correct for your chart of accounts. Consult the prior section if this has not yet been done.
See screen below, which shows the first quick report writer lay-out screen.
This screen is used to lay-out the basic characteristics of the report, such as the length of numeric fields and to select the report style. Options include:
The report title in menu
All reports created by the quick report writer must have a report menu title. This is the description of the report that will appear in the financial statements pull-down menu.
Report heading on report
The (optional) heading that will appear at the top of the report.
Note at bottom of report
The (optional) note or footer message at the bottom of the report.
Length of numeric fields
The length of the account balances that will appear in the report. This defaults to 12, but the size may be increased or decreased as required. If during the printing of a report a series of ***** replace the account balance in a column, this number needs to be increased.
Percentage decimal place
If one or more percentage columns will appear on the report, this field specifies how many decimal places the percentage will include. For example, a decimal place setting of "2" might display "14.27 %" whereas a setting of 1 would display the same number as "14.3 %".
Currency symbol
The currency symbol to place in front of the balances (but not the percentages) on the report. The most likely symbol to use would be the dollar sign ($) but leave this blank if you do not want to display a currency symbol.
Bracket negatives
This is the default quick report writer presentation of negative balances. If a debit account is in credit or a credit account in debit, balances will be surrounded by left and right brackets.
Add negative sign before
Accounts with negative balances will be displayed with a negative sign in front of the amount if yes is specified for this option. This replaces the bracketing of negative numbers.
Add negative sign at end
Accounts with negative balances will be displayed with a negative sign at the end of the amount if yes is specified for this option. This replaces bracketing of negative numbers.
Show percentage compares
Specify yes to include a percentage comparison after the first column of balances on the report. For example, this would be used to show what percentage of total sales each sales account contributed to, relative to total sales.
Add comma separators
Specify yes if you want numbers to include comma separators. For example, the amount "14561.50" would be displayed as "14,561.50" if comma separators was selected.
Once the basic report characters have been selected, the next step is to choose the report style. As mentioned, CAPITAL GL Controller's quick report writer comes with six pre-defined styles. Before printing of the report begins, CAPITAL will prompt you to specify the "current" period upon which the report will be based. The various report formats include:
List accounting information for this period only
Display period activity and balance sheet account balances up to and including the specified period.
List accounting information for the year-to-date
Displays total period activity for the year and balance sheet account balances up to and including the specified period.
Compare this period against year-to-date figures
Includes both the current period activity and the year-to-date activity, as well as balance sheet account balances up to and including the specified period. This is a multi-column report.
Compare the year-to-date to same time last year
Compares year-to-date activity plus balance sheet account balances for the specified period, and compares those to the results for the same time last year. This is a multi-column report.
Compare this period information against budgets
Includes period activity and balance sheet account balances for the selected period and compares these to budgets. This is a multi-column report.
Compare the year-to-date against yearly budgets
Includes year-to-date activity and balance sheet account balances for the selected period and compares these to yearly budgets. This is a multi-column report.
Once the basic characteristics and formatting of the report has been selected, the following screen will appear.
You may specify in the include column whether to include or exclude a section of your chart of accounts in the report. If you exclude essential sections (such as revenues) then calculations such as gross profit cannot be performed. Needless to say, if gross profit is not calculated other calculations will also be excluded from the report, such as net profit, retained earnings, and so forth.
Certain groups are optional. Other income accounts and non-current liabilities, for example, do not need to be included. The quick report writer will still be able to construct a complete set of financial statements without them. In some cases you may not wish to create a complete set of statements. For example, if you only want to produce a profit and loss statement, it would be necessary to exclude current assets, fixed assets, current liabilities, non-current liabilities, and CAPITAL from the reports. If you only wanted to produce an expense schedule, you would exclude all account groups except for operating expenses.
CAPITAL GL Controller supports two ways of calculating cost of sales. For more information on this subject see: Advice on stock control.
Note that in the quick report writer you must specify either a cost of sales group, or three groups made up of opening stock, purchasing and closing stock. You must specify one or the other but not both. That is to say, if you wanted the quick report writer to base its cost of sales calculations on the opening/purchases/closing stock method, you must leave the cost of sales group blank and specify account code groups for the opening, purchases and closing sections. Likewise, if you want the quick report writer to base its cost of sales on one or more "cost of sales" accounts, the opening/purchases/closing stock groups must be left blank and the cost of sales section specified.
CAPITAL will take a few seconds to build the report. Once this has been done it will prompt you for a file name. Enter a short identifying code for the report up to 8 characters or numbers in length. CAPITAL GL Controller's financial reports are automatically issued the file extension .gpt.
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