G/L Statement Designer

Overview

Use the Statement Designer to create or edit a report specification for generating financial statements.

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.

Important! For creating and editing statements, you must use the controls on the Statement Designer screen. Working with statements in some other way will cause errors and unexpected behaviour with statements.

Controls on the Statement Designer screen:

• To create a statement, click the Create New Statement button, which appears on both tabs (Getting Started and Statements).
• On the Statements tab, existing statements are listed in a table. To change one of these statements, click the statement name. Controls for working with the selected statement appear in the Statement Name field:
  • Rename
  • Edit
  • Delete
  • Add/Update

When you click Create New Statement or Edit, a working copy of the statement file is created on your workstation. This is a Microsoft Excel file that includes special commands. For more information, see FR Menu Commands.

You open the statement file in Excel and make changes to it. After you have finished making changes and have saved the file in Excel, you must upload it to the Sage 300 server by clicking the Add/Update button in the Statement Designer. Until you do this, you will not be able to use the new/updated statement.

After uploading the statement to the server, you should delete the working file on your workstation. This will avoid confusion if you later edit the statement, because a new copy of the file will be created on your workstation.

Using the Statement Designer to Design Financial Statements

For information on using the Statement Designer to create custom financial statements, see Designing Financial Statements.

For a series of short lessons on using the Statement Designer, see Financial Reporter Tutorial.

For information on the fields that you can use in financial statements, see:

• Account Master Fields
• Transaction Fields

Including Information in Printed Financial Statements

You can include the following options when printing financial statements from the G/L Financial Statement Designer by clicking FR > FR View on the menu bar:

• Report Options
• Audit Information
• Formulas

Report Options

When you select Report Options, the first page of the financial statement displays the following information:

• Statement name
• Fiscal year and period
• Report type (actual or provisional)
• Account processing and sorting order
• Account selection ranges

Including Audit Information

The Audit Information option is available only when using FR View in the Statement Designer—it is not available on the G/L Print Financial Statements screen.

When you select Audit Information, the statement includes information from the control information columns of the spreadsheet (columns A through D), as well as the report columns that are usually printed.

Including Formulas

The Formulas option is available only when using FR View in the Statement Designer—it is not available on the G/L Print Financial Statements screen.

Usually, when you generate a report from a financial report specification, Financial Reporter inserts balances and net amounts from the database into the generated financial report. However, if you select Formulas, Financial Reporter creates a financial report from the specification with a formula for each general ledger balance or net that appears in the final report. You can then update that financial report with current database values by recalculating the spreadsheet (pressing F9).

The most common type of report that is composed only of formulas is one that keeps financial ratios.

Note: Spreadsheets with formulas are much larger than standard report specifications—and they are less flexible.

Financial Reporter automatically refreshes General Ledger data the next time you load the linked spreadsheet in the Statement Designer. You can also use the G/L Print Financial Statements screen to recalculate and print the report.

If you want to change the report (for example, by adding new accounts in the chart), you must regenerate the report to incorporate the changes in your statement.