Design Statements

The ultimate purpose of a General Ledger system is the ability to create informative financial statements, such as Statements of Financial Position or Operating Expense reports.

To help you with this process, the General Ledger module includes a statement design system specially tailored to the requirements of General Ledger reporting. You can create single or combined General Ledger balance reports. You can combine balances from non-contiguous accounts. You can include Actual or Budget, Current or Year-to-Date, this Year or Last Year balances in monthly, quarterly, or yearly formats. You can also merge your reports into Microsoft Word or Excel to create presentation quality statements.

NOTE: You cannot create Financial Statements until the General Ledger is built, and beginning balances are entered.

FIMS offers the following options to run financial statements from the Reports menu:

• Consolidated Financial Statements: Collapses General Ledger values from selected Funds into a single report.
• Consolidated Financial Statements Export: Creates an ASCII data file that you can use to create a presentation quality statement in Microsoft Word. Like printing consolidated financial statements, this export will combine balances from selected Funds in a single report.
• Fund Statements: Prints multiple statements (one or more per selected Fund or Fund Rep. It cannot consolidate financial information from more than one Fund, unless they are set up as Master / Subordinate Funds.
• Fund Statements Export: Creates an ASCII data file that you can use to create a presentation quality statement in Microsoft Word. Like printed Fund Statements, the export is not designed to consolidate financial information from more than one Fund, except when they are set up as Master / Subordinate Funds.
• Columnar Financial Statements: Creates statements that display one Fund per row, with General Ledger values in columns.

These Financial Statements are custom reports that you create to reflect your reporting preferences and General Ledger design. Each Statement is made up of a user-defined Row Format and a Column Format. Refer to Creating Row Formats and Creating Column Formats for more information.

Consolidated Financial Statements and Fund Statements use the Row and Column formats in the conventional orientation. However, Columnar Financial Statements use the Row and Column formats together to determine the values to print in the columns (each row represents a different Fund). When you create a Statement record, you can indicate which method (or methods) the statement is designed for. This ensures that the Statement only appears as an option when you run the type of report it is associated with. For example, if a Statement should only be run as a Columnar Financial Statement, it will not be available for Fund Statements.

NOTE: FIMS also offers many standard reports that you can run for any General Ledger. Refer to General Ledger Reports in the Reports chapter for more information.