Whether you are presenting your financial statements to a Board of Directors; an Auditor; or your Controller/CFO ~ your financial statements represent the culmination of your work each day. Now perhaps you don’t have control of the bottom line figures, but what about the format of the report, the presentation of the material, and most importantly, “How hard was it for you to get this information together”?
We all know that excel plays a major component in most finance folks day-to-day operations. It just seems easier to manipulate, calculate, and parse the data that you need within Excel. But, it doesn’t HAVE to be such a major component in your financial statement preparation.
With the right accounting system, the right tools, and the right training, you could streamline all the processes you go through to create your financials!
One of the key components of using Microsoft Dynamics GP is the open accessibility to the security authorized users of the financial information. I’ve listed some of my favorite shortcuts and tools that our Microsoft Dynamics GP customers use ~ but I’m sure there are favorites for others that I don’t even realize the value that the users see compared to what they did before.
Financial Statement Generation
- FRx Report Manager – Of course I’m going to say “FRx” Financial Reporter, but many people don’t realize that a module available along with FRx called Report Manager allows you to pull together the financial statements within a comprehensive report book, which can contain other information end users may need in various document types and files. You can just press a button and have your Balance sheet, income statement, cash flow statement, a ‘pdf’ report bringing in other information, a word doc explaining a new procedure, an excel spreadsheet with data outside of your system, and more ~ all in one booklet!
- FRx Webport – Can you imagine just telling your managers that they can view whatever reports they need – and have them refreshable, just by going to your intranet? With Webport, you can publish specific report layouts and provide access to key personnel and allow them to drill into specific account transaction detail if required.
Day to day quick lookups – For quick inquiries into the data for a specific account, account range, or transaction, here are a few outstanding options in Microsoft Dynamics GP.
- Account Rollup – A nifty query screen allowing groups of accounts and up to four columns of figures for quick analysis of set of departments or account areas. This means you can hand pick several accounts to be seen together, and save them for future lookups or just do it as an ad-hoc item for today. You can print this inquiry too!
- Account Transaction List – This quick view into your financial transactions allows filtering by many options at once. You can go as far as saying look across a range of accounts for a particular transaction description between two given dates with a particular dollar figure credited within the transaction. That is powerful search capability very easily accomplished!
Simple lookups/reports – of course there are screens allowing Actual to Budget, Summary and Detail balances, and trial balance reports and posting journals. And there is the Smartlist/Excel Reports options that allow users to save their favorites from the generic packaged queries. I don’t need to list all of these ready to go screens and queries ~ but they are wonderful for everyday use. I mentioned Account Rollup and Financial Lists (above) which you may not have thought to ask about because they are not something you would expect out of the box!
Complicated Reports and Cross Table Inquiries – For very specific requirements, we utilize:
- FRx Financial Report writer is the tool for everything from departmental and company consolidations and eliminations to taking financial data from within Dynamics GP and marrying it to spreadsheets from other financial records and report as one. Once you have your reports created, used the Report Manager I spoke about at the top to produce top notch presentations to your audience!
- Smartlist/Excel Report Builder - We find that this tool allows companies to define and categorize relationships between their data fields as possibly only they could find a common connection. The data is presented in either basic table format or complicated spreadsheets that they may have designed and require. This tool has extended the reporting ability out of Microsoft Dynamics GP so that any manager can be happy with the data you present!
So comparing what you might have at your fingertips today ~ could you use these unique and simple tools for YOUR financial statement preparation and presentation?
By Abra Lynne Gilman, Borek Business Solutions – Microsoft Dynamics GP Oregon Partner
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