21st Century Accounting Help - General Ledger

Financial Reports

21st Century Accounting provides a number of automatic financial reports, including income statements, balance sheets, trial balance reports, and cash flow statements. In the General Ledger/Configure/Financial Reports window, you can design your own financial reports, using the provided reports as models. Or you can design your own financial reports from scratch.

Rows and Columns

You use two functions in 21st Century Accounting to design financials: General Ledger/Configure/Financial Report Templates and General Ledger/Configure/Financial Reports.

The templates control the rows on financial reports - the accounts and headings that print on the reports. For example, in General Ledger/Configure/Financial Report Templates, you choose whether to print all income accounts, slected income accounts, only non-zero accounts, individual accounts summed under a text heading, and so forth).
The reports control the columns on financial reports - the type and time frame of the data that prints on the reports. For example, in General Ledger/Configure/Financial Reports, you add columns and choose whether the columns print actual activity, budgeted amounts, period ending balances, year-to-date totals, ratios, and so forth.

The Original Reports

21st Century Accounting provides a set of default financial reports that you cannot change and a copy of each default financial report that you can customize. The editable financial reports provided by 21st Century Accounting are based on the editable financial report templates, so when you customize a template, the report(s) based on the template will reflect your template customizations.

If you "mess up" a financial report and want to start over with a fresh report, make a new copy of the default financial report. To copy one of the default reports (in fact, to copy any of the reports), highlight the report in the left pane. Right-click the mouse or press the Windows Menu key (right of the Windows Icon key to the right of the Spacebar) for the options menu and select Copy.

Using the Report Design Workspace

The financial report design workspace looks like a report page. The page contains active areas (headers, footers, and columns, for example) that you can double-click to open a window for configuring that area. As you move about in the workspace, watch for hints in a window's status bar about what to do in that window.

Press F1 or right-click for more detailed information in the online Help for creating and customizing financial reports.

Headers and Footers

Small rectangles across the top and the bottom of the workspace represent the standard areas for headers and footers you want to print on the report; a title, page numbers, date printed, company name, and so forth.

Double-click a rectangle or press F2 to open the Properties window, where you select the information you want ptrinted in the area represented by the rectangle ("upper left," "upper center," "lower left," and so forth). Right-click in the text area of the Properties window to display the substitution string menu, which is a list of generic names for the information (like date, time, user ID, and so forth) that can be printed.

Body

The bordered area in the center of the workspace represents the body of the report: the section captions, the account names, and the account data that you want to print on the report. Right-click in the open area just above the top border of the body to open the Column Properties window, or double-click an existing column heading to make changes to the column heading, type of data, the time frame, and the type of analysis presented in the columns. Right-click in the Properties text area to display the substitution string menu, a list of generic names for the information (like period start and end dates, year, and so forth) can be printed along with the column heading.

Captions and Accounts

To change the properties of financial report captions and accounts, you must run General Ledger/Configure/Financial Report Templates. In the Templates window, you can double-click or press F2 on caption to open a Properties window where you can do some typographical formatting and other customizing based on captions (the labels for sections of rows of accounts). Double-click or press F2 on an account to open the account Properties window.

Windows

Properties windows. Use the Properties windows to create and edit report titles, headers, and footers. Each window is specific to the area where you click to open the window.
Column Properties windows. Use the Column Properties window to control the type of data and type of analysis (activity, comparison, and so forth) shown on this financial report. You also create a heading for the column, select the time frame (period, to-date, and so forth), and the amount of time covered by the report.
Captions properties window. Use the Caption Properties window in the Financial Reports window to indicate whether to include the line amounts in the column total.