12.2 CUSTOM FINANCIAL REPORTING
It is impossible to discuss the process of financial reporting without discussing an important tool for accomplishing this: {^financial report writer. The financial report writer is the tool used to produce custom reports from available general ledger data. This tool is a natural adjunct to every viable general ledger system. In certain cases it can even serve as a replacement for standard general ledger reporting capabilities.
UNDERSTANDING FINANCIAL REPORT WRITERS
Historically financial report writers first worked only with general ledger systems, providing an extension to basic reporting features offered. Today, although financial report writers are more generalized and can work with other financial systems, their main application still lies with the general ledger system. The needs for custom reporting of general ledger information are so specialized that many integrated financial systems use two different report writers—a financial report writer designed specifically for use with the general ledger and a second, more generalized report writer designed for use in any accounting system.
Like earlier report writers, many of today's general ledger report writers are one-dimensional. One-dimensional report writers produce reports with fixed columns that are uniformly defined for the entire report. The variable dimension is the report's rows, which are defined according to a series of report specifications. This is not a limitation, though. These reports may also be very sophisticated, for example, consolidating multicompany expense and revenue accounts into each report line, such as the income statement and balance sheet in Figure 12-5. These report writers usually only access information on the general ledger master file and sometimes the journal history file.
Contrasted to this, some general ledger systems may have two-dimensional report writers. Two-dimensional report writers are more complex and allow each data element in the report to be uniquely defined. Like a spreadsheet, two-dimensional report writers are cell oriented, allowing each cell to contain a specific data item, independent of what the rest of that row or column may contain.
For the sake of simplicity, this chapter focuses only on one-dimensional report writers and their capabilities. The most pragmatic approach to this is to look at commonly found capabilities for
• Defining report lines.
• Defining report columns.
NEXT MONTH'S TOPIC: DEFINING REPORT LINES