Financial Reporter Tutorial

In this tutorial, you will learn:

How to use the Financial Statement Designer to construct financial statements.
How specification files generate financial statements.
How to use tools such as FR Paste and FR View.

Before you create new statements or modify existing specification files (such as those included with General Ledger), read and perform the exercises in this tutorial to familiarize yourself with the product.

The lessons in this tutorial use sample data included with System Manager. For information about how to install and refresh sample data, see the System Manager help and documentation.
The lessons in this tutorial assume that you are using Microsoft Excel 2007 or later.

About the Statement Designer

You use the Financial Statement Designer to create, edit, and test financial statements and financial statement specifications. It provides add-in programs that you use in Microsoft Excel to retrieve and manipulate Sage 300 data.

Note: Financial Reporter relies on the capabilities of Microsoft Excel to create financial statements using Sage 300 data. For more information about using Excel, refer to the Excel help or documentation.

The Financial Statement Designer can interpret a "report specification" (a set of instructions for creating a report) and generate a financial report. When you open the Financial Statement Designer, Sage 300 opens an Excel spreadsheet using a macro that adds Financial Reporter commands and functions.

For more information, see G/L Statement Designer.

About Report Specification Files

A report specification file is a spreadsheet with specific commands and functions that Financial Reporter uses to produce a financial statement. For example, it can specify the following information:

Data to include in each column of a financial statement.
Which accounts will be reported in each row or group of row.
Print layout for the statement.

Statement specifications are generalized, so the same specification file can be used over and over again to produce financial statements for different departments and different time periods. For example, a single specification file can print balance sheets for any department in your company as of the last day of any fiscal period in your fiscal year. For more information, see About Financial Reporter.

Next topic: Lesson 1: Using Formulas to Retrieve G/L Data