Reporting End of Course Assignment

Training Homework/Practice Guide - Reporting Session

Task 1 - Display and Navigate Reports

1. Navigate to Reporting>Report Folders, double click into Financial Statement Reports, then Income Statement Reports, Monthly Income Statement Reports.
2. Choose (double click) to Corp by Minor, click display from the Report screen.
3. Change the Period using the drop-down, and re-display.
4. Review each of the columns on the display to become familiar with the layout and the data being pulled in each column, including the variance calculations as applicable.
5. To save a copy of this report to your “My Reports” folder, click the disk/save button to the right of the Report name, click the first blue “Reports” word, highlight “My Reports”, click “Select Folder” at the bottom, and click Save. 
6. Re-display the report, right-click on one of the lines, and select one of the levels - try “Account” for now.  From the account view, right-click on one of the lines and choose “Transactions”. From the Transactions screen, display transactions going back several periods using the Period drop-down options.
7. Side note, the Transactions screen can be accessed via Daily>Account Transactions as well, or Records>Accounts (right click on an account), but also here with drilling down from reports.
8. Click the Escape button on your keyboard to get back to the account report view on your screen.  Click Escape again to get back to the original report. The Escape button should close the drill-down tab and go back to the previous tab, provided you haven’t navigated to other tabs in the interim.
9. Click the “Reports” drop-down button in the light blue bar above and export this report into an Excel Spreadsheet.  View the other output options in the Report drop-down and try another one as well.

Task 2 - Organize Report Folders

1. Navigate to Reporting>Report Folders
2. View the different folders here in this section. Now double-click on the “My Reports” folder
3. Using the drop-down by the “New” button in the light blue bar, choose “Folder” to create a new sub-folder within “My Reports”.  
4. Name the folder as your name or whatever you’d like. Unclick the “Use same permissions as parent folder” checkbox. 
5. Now, allow “All Users” to access this folder by choosing Access Level as “1-Allow”. That would allow other users to access this folder, but not edit anything within the folder  
6. Then add another level to the permissions here by clicking the button. Make that an individual User under “Type” and make the User be yourself, with an access level of “Modify”. With this configuration, you’ll be the only one who can modify this folder or any reports within it, but others can see the reports if needed. Feel free to change the configuration to your own needs. Save 
7. If the “Corp by Minor” or other report is in the general “My Reports” folder, then cut/paste that into your own folder.

Task 3 - Report Editing - Select and General Tabs

1. Let’s re-display the “Corp by Minor” report from your folder. You can double-click on it from your new Folder.  Also, the good thing about financial statements like this one is that if you navigate to Reporting>Financial Statements, then the system will pull up the last financial statement that you accessed.
2. Now click into “Customize Report”, and notice the 4 tabs that configure this report - Select, General, Rows, and Columns. You should be on the “Select” tab currently.
3. Notice the two checkbox options for “Revenue/Expense” and “Balance Sheet”. This current report is a “Revenue/Expense”.  (AKA Income Statement, P&L, Statement of Activities, etc)
4. Click on the Pick List button.  This is the easiest way to configure what area of the GL you want to pull  - ( i.e., a branch, a department, salaries, everything but X, or multiple parameters).  If you don’t pick anything, then the system will pull everything in “Revenue/Expense” - which may very well be fine if you’re pulling the full Corporation in this “Corp by Minor.”
5. Navigate around the Pick List and choose various options. Once you click OK, you’ll notice that the system will write the logic based on your Pick List selections. Go back into the Pick List and make a few more Selections just to get familiar with using the Pick List here.
6. Now, click on the “General” tab to the right of the “Select” tab. We won’t get into Report Descriptions here, but certainly the cosmetic buttons at the bottom are useful.
7. Click on the “Schedule Report” button. This screen is where you can schedule a report to be emailed automatically to another staff member (or yourself) on a regular frequency. Once the schedule is saved, make sure to view the “Schedule Log” to see that the intended schedule is correct.
8. There are other cosmetic items within the General Tab, but one that is helpful for downloading Excel reports with multiple tabs is the “Excel Properties,” which, if you go to “Sheet” within that button, you can “Create new sheet for each page break”.  This allows for a tab for every page break of say… location, or department, etc.

Task 4 - Report Editing - Rows Tab

1. Within that “Corp by Minor” or whatever report that you have created, click the “Customize Report” button and click to the “Rows” tab (between General and Columns.
2. Look at the Rows, which define how this report is sorted. The Corp by Minor will be sorted by Final Total, then by Category Type, then Major Account, then Minor Account.
3. The Category Type is Revenues and Expenses.  Let’s click the checkbox to add a Header for Revenues and Expenses on that line. Re-display the report. Notice that you now have a Header for Revenues at the top.
4. Go back to Customize. Use the buttons to add/delete/move/cut/copy/paste/etc the rows as needed.
5. Delete the Major row.  Now add an additional row under the Final Total for either Location or Department.
6. Re-display and notice that the report now sorts by that new sorting row for location or department.
7. Review the other options in the rows for - Page Break, adding spaces before or after headers/totals, adding borders, etc.
8. Try multiple “Row” combinations.  This is the area where you configure whether the report will be a “One-Pager” of the full organization, or if it will be a long report that delineates by location, department, individual accounts, etc.

Task 5 - Report Editing - Columns Tab

1. When you display the Report, view the columns that come up and get familiar with the output as it pertains to the columns being presented.
2. Go to “Customize Report” and click on the Columns tab, just right of the Rows Tab.
3. Scan through each line to see how the columns are configured to pull specific numbers from actuals, budgets, years, months, etc.
4. Use the drop-downs in each line to change the Year, Month, and the Data Column (Actual/Budget/Forecast, etc)
5. Use the buttons to add/delete/move/copy/etc. 
6. Change Line 3 to be Forecast, 1 Year Ago, YTD Mo.  When you see the word “Month” (or “Mo” abbreviated), it will be dynamic when this report displays and will assume the period chosen at the display screen for any columns using “Month/Mo” in any form.
7. Change Line 4 to be “Actual/Forecast” for This Year and the Annual period.
8. Now add a line underneath and choose “$ Variance”.  The Properties will come up automatically, and you can choose the columns to compare to make that variance column. If you need to edit the calculation in the future, you can click on that line and click the button.
9. Review those first 3 drop-downs for the various options and combinations. Remember, the “Month” and “Mo” will be dynamic to whatever is chosen on the front screen.
10. Now look at the other configuration columns here for Header, Width, Conditions, Alignment, Number Format, etc. These are more cosmetic, but the “Conditional” checkbox will allow you to have certain conditions on each column if you want (for example) each department's actuals to be in a column.
11. Re-display the report to see your changes. This can be a testing/practice report, so if you pull some strange combinations here, that’s okay.  Maybe save this under the name “Testing/Practice Report” so you can play around with it.

Task 6 - Advanced Reporting

1. Navigate to Reporting>Report Folders, make sure you’re in the main area (click on the blue word “Reports” if not).
2. Now double click on “Detail Reports”, double click on “General Ledger Reports”, then on “General Ledger”.
3. This is just an example of a Detail Report, where you can see more of a transaction-level report instead of a financial statement.
4. Click Display, and your full GL detail transactions will come up, or Customize this to narrow down the area you want to pull via the “Select” tab and the Pick List. This can be saved or copied to your own folder if you need a detailed report available.
5. Exit from that, go back to the Reports Folder, choose “Generic Reports”, choose “AP Reports”, and “A/P Aging Report”.  
6. This shows an example of a report that doesn’t quite fit as a financial statement or a detail report, but is needed information in the system to show the 30/60/90 day age of the outstanding invoices.  Other “Generic” reports are available as catch-all type reporting that may be needed for any information field in SGA.
7. Close out of that and navigate to Reporting>Report Lists.  This is where multiple reports can be spit out with one button (Execute) once this has been configured. The reports can even be output as tabs in a single Excel spreadsheet.  Emails, downloads, PDFs, and Excel are all options for the output. Review this screen.