About Financial Reporter

Financial Reporter is a powerful reporting tool that you can use to manipulate, format, graph, and print general ledger data. You can use Financial Reporter to create financial statements and statement specifications in Microsoft Excel that display data from Sage 300 General Ledger.

Financial Reporter includes the following screens for working with financial statements:

• G/L Print Financial Statements. You use the G/L Print Financial Statements screen to print financial statements.

  Note: All Sage 300 financial statements are Excel spreadsheet files that contain the functions required to read general ledger data.

  You can print using one of the sample statements that come with General Ledger, or you can use a custom report specification that you create using the G/L Statement Designer.

  For more information about the sample statements that are included with General Ledger, see Sample Financial Statements.

  For instructions on printing financial statements, see G/L Print Financial Statements Screen.

• G/L Statement Designer. The G/L Statement Designer is an add-in program that works with Microsoft Excel. You use it to create customized statement specifications, and you can use it to generate the statements.

  When you use the Statement Designer to create or edit a statement, the statement files include special Financial Reporter functions. These functions let you retrieve and work with data from your Sage 300 company database.

  To create and edit statements with the Statement Designer, you must have:

  • The 64-bit version of Excel for Microsoft 365 installed on both the Sage 300 server and your workstation. And you must use this version of Excel to edit statements.
  • An Excel add-in installed. If you do not have the add-in, you'll be asked to install it when you open the Statement Designer.

  The spreadsheet add-in is available only when you use the Statement Designer screen in Sage 300.

  Microsoft Excel is not included with Sage 300 General Ledger. If you want to use Excel to create financial statements, you must purchase it separately. (You can install Excel before or after installing General Ledger.)

  For more information, see G/L Statement Designer.

After you create a report using the Statement Designer, you can print it at any time using the Print Financial Statements screen or using the FR View command from the FR menu in Excel.

Note: There are some differences when printing a statement using the Print Financial Statements screen compared with using the Statement Designer. For more information, see About Printing Financial Statements.

Important! You must purchase and install Microsoft Excel separately before you can use the Statement Designer.

Key Financial Reporter Concepts

Financial Reporter is based upon a few simple concepts:

• Excel Worksheets with Financial Reporter functions. Financial statements are Microsoft Excel spreadsheets that use special functions to extract data from the Sage 300 company database.

  You can place Financial Reporter functions anywhere in a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet program looks up the General Ledger values when it recalculates the spreadsheet. For information on Financial Reporter functions, see Financial Reporter Functions.

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

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

  Statement specifications allow you to assign default functions and formulas to columns of the spreadsheet, and to specify whether 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 do not have to use them. You can view an account balance just by inserting a formula in a single cell, and then recalculating the worksheet.

  It is our assumption that most of the statements you create will be generated from statement specifications.

  For more information about financial statement specifications, see About Financial Statement Specifications.

• Flexible Data Selection. 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).
  • When designing statements, keep in mind that a generalized financial statement can be printed with the actual or provisionally-posted amounts of any particular department or division. However, the transaction‐related commands, FRTRN, FRTRNA, FRTRNDR, and FRTRNCR, do not handle provisional amounts. If you use these commands, only actual amounts are included in the report.
  • If you include 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.
  • When creating a financial report, you can enter formulas that allow you to drill down to associated transactions in the resulting report.

Producing Financial Statements

Producing financial statements from General Ledger data involves three broad processes:

1. Designing the chart of accounts.
2. Creating a financial statement specification.
3. Printing the financial statement.

Designing the Chart of Accounts

When you set up the ledger, decide on an account-numbering and classification scheme to suit your financial reporting needs. A well-designed chart of accounts will simplify the job of designing and maintaining financial statement specifications.

Important! Make sure that the account segment is the first segment in the account structures you create. Financial Reporter can select accounts more easily when the account segment is first.

For more information on designing the chart of accounts, see About Designing Your General Ledger.

Creating a Financial Statement Specification

A financial statement specification defines the format and contents of a financial statement.

Financial Reporter includes several sample report specifications that you can use to print standard financial statements.

If you want to create special statements for your company, we suggest that you customize one of these standard statements.

For an overview and a few short lessons on creating financial statements, see the Financial Reporter Tutorial.

For more detailed information on creating specifications, see Designing Financial Statements.

Printing Financial Statements

After creating specifications, use the Print Financial Statements screen to select the specification you want to print.

To print a statement, you select the report you want to print, select from a variety of print options, and then click Print. Excel gets the data, prints it, and returns you to the Company Desktop.

For more information about printing financial statements, see About Printing Financial Statements.