Create financial reports
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The Financial Report Writer is where you create and edit financial reports, including standard financial reports, income statements, and balance sheet reports. It also includes an array of other reports that analyze or highlight key business metrics. For example, revenue by product line or expenses by project.
With a financial report you can:
- select groups of accounts to include in your report.
- add analysis based on your dimension data like items by product line or customers by type.
- analyze data based on selected departments.
- expand or collapse sections of the report to show or hide account detail.
- select what appears in columns, like actual amounts, budget amounts, and computations.
- nonfinancial data like customer email addresses
Prerequisites
Access to financial reports can vary depending on your permissions. The ability to view, add, and edit financial reports is controlled by separate General Ledger permissions.
Working with financial reports involves multiple tasks: running reports, editing reports, drilling down into a report, and so on. Each of these can require a specific set of permissions, both for the General Ledger and for the Company.
Make sure that you have all of the necessary permissions when working with financial reports.
Based on the setting in My preferences, dimensions and accounts that are marked Inactive:
- appear in the list and are selectable for use in the report if Display all values is selected
or - are ignored and not visible if Hide inactive values is selected
Review your existing financial reports
Usually, your company will come with a set of prebuilt financial reports. You can edit these reports to suit your needs, or create new ones.
| Subscription |
General Ledger |
|---|---|
| Regional availability |
All regions |
| User type | Business, Employee |
| Permissions |
Reports: List, View |
To see the financial reports that have already been created for your company, go to Reports > All > Core > Financial reports.
- To view an existing financial report, select HTML, Excel, or PDF to the right of the report. View will show you what the report looks like on the page or in print.
- To edit an existing financial report, select Edit to the left of the report.
- To create a new report, select Add (circle) next to Financial reports.
Learn to use the Financial Report Writer
The Financial Report Writer steps you through creating or editing a financial report. Use the report writer for adding rows and columns to decide how your report will be formatted on page and in print.
| What would you like to do? | Tips |
|---|---|
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Get help on a particular tab. |
While you're on a particular tab, you can:
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Learn by doing |
Try examining an existing financial report. If you find one that you want to use as a starting point, open it and select Duplicate. |
Create a financial report
The Financial Report Writer gives options for controlling all aspects of your financial report, from building your rows and columns to setting precise formatting options.
| Subscription |
General Ledger |
|---|---|
| Regional availability |
All regions |
| User type | Business |
| Permissions |
Reports: List, View, Add, Run |
- Name your report and select your basic report structure (Report info tab).
- Review the options in the Report structure section of the Report info tab, using the report samples as a guide. After you create a report, you cannot change the report structure.
- Optionally, assign a Report type, a Report audience, or both. Knowing the report types and audiences is helpful when filtering lists of reports.
- By default, reports are set to Active. If you do not plan to use the report, uncheck This report is active.
- Select either Accounts or Dimensions, depending on what you'd like to see on your report rows.
- Build your account rows.
Depending on the report structure you selected on the Report info tab, you'll either build rows from account groups or dimension structures. For existing reports, the headings along the left side of the tab reflect the account groups or dimension structures already added to the report.
Financial Report Writer rows Type of rows Description In this type of report, you select the account groups that you want to appear on the left side of your report. For example, a balance sheet report might include "Assets" and "Liabilities and Equity."
In this type of report, you select the dimension structures that you want to appear on the left side of your report. For example, you might want to show rows for customers, projects by type, or certain locations or departments.
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Set up columns (Columns tab).
- Choose the columns that you want to include in the report.
- Decide what value that you want to include in each column. For example, you might want to see the account names or dimension names on the left, followed by actual columns for different reporting periods.
- Column values can be based on calculations, such as summary calculations that operate on 2 or more columns. One example is computing the average of a set of columns. For reports that feature account groups on rows, define more complex calculations on the Computations tab.
- For reports that use a dimension structure, an account group is required.
- Select the account group purpose. This is displayed in the list and in the report.
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Filter the report (Filters tab).
- You can set options such as the "As of date" and reporting method. You can also filter the report by dimension, such as filtering for a particular set of locations.
- In practice, many reports are designed to prompt the user for the "as of date" and other criteria when the report is run. That way, you can create a single report and let the user pick the criteria when the report is run.
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Set page header, footer, font, and other report format options (Format tab).
Row formatting options let you control the appearance and spacing of row headings and totals. Select Help (the Question mark) next to Row Formatting and Total Formatting in the Rows section to learn more.
If columns are missing when you preview the report, use the Filters tab to show zero balance columns. Zero balance columns are forced to be shown. - Optionally, include notations for 1 or several rows in the report.
- Decide who can access the report (Permissions tab).
- Finish the report with any optional next steps. Optional steps include adding the report to a dashboard, making it a favorite, or scheduling it to run automatically (Next Steps).
By default, financial reports are set to Public: everyone can see them. If a report is private, only the users in the entity and with permissions have access to the report. Top-level admins also see private reports if they check Include Private on the list of reports.
To make entity-level financial reports private by default, deactivate Set default permissions to public at the top-level General Ledger configuration.
Launch the financial report writer from a dashboard
To add a financial report to a dashboard but the report does not exist yet, select Add (circle) to launch the Financial Report Writer directly from the dashboard. To learn more, see Create a new financial report or graph from the dashboard.
Need more help?
There is plenty of training available for reports. Sage Intacct offers training courses to help you understand reporting. Check Sage University for details about pricing and availability.
Be sure to check out the Intacct Community and search the Knowledge Base for specific issues. Often you'll find the answers there.
If you have questions or encounter particular issues, be sure to check out our troubleshooting topics.
