Column Options and Order for Financial Statements - SOA & SFP
Could you please consider updating financials to include easier options as to which columns to pull in and it what order when you need a number of columns on the report? (e.g., monthly amounts for current year/prior year/budget, year-to-date amount for current year/prior year/budget, and associated dollar and % variances between any two columns)? For our board report, we currently have to pull together three templates into another custom report, then extract numbers from that custom report, delete various columns, and then drop that into an Excel file. Overall, your software is great, but the limitations with column setup in financials is a weakness and just too many steps to do every month, as well as leaving too much room for error in doing these multiple steps. In working with several other software packages in previous jobs and creating financial reports in each, we often used an offset # (e.g., -3 for March, if your year-end is June) and were able to designate various arrangements/combinations of columns for our SOA, for example. Just by using the offset and previously setting up report formats #’s designating what was needed in each column, we could run financials with just a couple of menu clicks. Following are some examples of column comparisons that are helpful/necessary to have in various instances:
Example:
Current Month Actual
Current Month Budget
$ Variance from Current Month Budget
% Variance from Current Month Budget
Current Month Actual
Current Month (Prior Year) Actual
$ Variance from Current Month (Prior Year) Actual
% Variance from Current Month (Prior Year) Actual
Current YTD Actual
Current YTD Budget
$ Variance from Current YTD Budget
% Variance from Current YTD Budget
Current YTD Actual
Prior YTD (Prior Year) Actual
$ Variance from Prior YTD (Prior Year) Actual
% Variance from Prior YTD (Prior Year) Actual
Lori Melby
shared this idea
11/19/2024:Financials: Updated the printing of Financials. This update will allow users to add headers and footer content to printed financial statements, along with customizing report titles and columns. In Financials, users will find Content in the left hand menu. This will allow for financial_publish_header and financial_publish_footer. These content areas will be html compatible with merge fields: report date, title(this will pull the title from the Financials Settings), filter values, report timestamp, report title. Settings is also a new left hand menu that will allow users rename their reports. For example, Balance Sheet can be changed to Statement of Financial Position. When processing a financial report, users will see a new left hand menu option, Print. Print will be a print option with the header and footer content areas added. Publish will remove all lines on the report and it will print on a white background. Once Print is selected, the column sort, show and title will appear. Users can use this to reorder columns and relabel the columns. The show will allow users to remove a column in the print. Once a user selects a report, the left hand menu will collapse all other reports into Reports to allow for easier option selections. Added the timestamp to the bottom right hand corner of the report in CSuite and Print Page option.
When using Print, users will need to use the content area to add the titles to the report, dates, and filters to the report header.
Permission: Added permission for Settings. Will be released with Admin Permission only
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Paul Tomkins
commented
I appreciate the improvements made but I don't think it totally answers the idea presented. It would be great to be able to have customization with the column options instead of the preset options presented by CSuite. For example, as mentioned in today's Catching Up with Releases webinar, having YTD actual, YTD budget, and prior YTD in one income statement report. Or, in the balance sheet report, having last quarter, the prior quarter, and last year.
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'Shawn Hedden'
commented
a way, either through custom fields/reports or within the edit options, to be able to run both a single month AND a YTD income statement with prior year comparisons on a single report? This is how my board prefers to review financials but I’ve found that I’ve needed to pull two reports and manually combine them. Please see attached for an example. In this example, we’re looking at both April 2024 with p/y comparison as well as Jan-April with p/y comparison.
I’ve found that combining these statements manually lends itself to error, for example if one report has activity in a certain account but the other statement does not, the line items don’t line up exactly.