Setting up Financial Analysis reports
Financial Analysis is an ad hoc transaction based report writer, fulfilling internal month end reporting requirements. Financial Analysis groups together, summarizes, or lists transactions using specified selection and sequencing criteria.
You can use Financial Analysis to produce sales or expense reports, project and job costing information, and other reports using the analysis coding structure you have established in your ledger.
Financial Analysis Layouts (FNL) is used to design a financial analysis report. Once it has been defined, Financial Analysis (FNA) is used to produce the report as often as you like.
The design of a report involves specifying, for example, the account range to be included, how the report is to be sequenced, and the selection criteria required.
Financial Analysis reports include the following features:
Selection Codes and Level Codes
The information on a Financial Analysis report is extracted from a series of account transactions. Extensive selection criteria allow you to identify the transactions you require. You can include up to five run-time selection codes, which appear when you run a Financial Analysis report. These allow you to narrow down your selection by account range, journal type, analysis codes, and so on.
Three level codes control the report sequence and totalling. The sort options are the same as the selection options.
Report Columns
A report can have up to 12 columns, allowing you to show figures for different time scales, for budgets and so on. You can use predefined columns, for example This Period Actual, This Period Budget, Year-To-Date Actual. Alternatively, you can define columns that have been calculated from other columns. For example, to show the variance between actual and budget columns. Financial Analysis (FNA) can perform forecasting based on actual and budget figures. It can also produce a spread across periods based on actual and budget figures.
Multi-Currency Considerations
You can report in any of the currency values available on each transaction. You can include different values, in different columns. You can access the six period exchange rates available for each currency and use any of these to revalue accounts, or transactions.
Consolidation
An analysis report can draw together data from more than one business unit. This allows you to consolidate different parts of your business. You can also apply currency exchange rates to this consolidation process, if required.
Data Transfer
In addition to producing a printed, or stored, report, Financial Analysis (FNA) can produce a file of the extracted report data. This file can be produced in a variety of formats which enable it to be transferred to other software packages.
Reporting on Balance or Transactions
SunSystems Financials contains an optional Balance file which contains a summary of the ledger transactions posted to each account. This file can be used to speed up the processing of some reports.
Financial Analysis (FNA) uses the Balance file, if it is available, wherever it is appropriate to a report setup.