21st Century Accounting Help - General Ledger

Financial Report Templates

Use General Ledger/Configure/Financial Report Templates to create new templates of your own, which you can then use when you design financial reports.

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.

In summary, use Financial Report Templates to manipulate the financial report captions and accounts, which by default are associated with account categories (Asset/Cash equivalent, Liability/Current Liability, and so on) assigned in your Chart of Accounts. You use Financial Report Templates if you want to rename the financial report captions, remove or add certain accounts under the captions, and add summary captions. You can then design financial reports based on your new templates with General Ledger/Configure/Financial Reports.

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.

Removing and Adding Accounts

Highlight the account, right-click and select Cut.

To add accounts, open the Account Selector with the Accounts...button. You can drag or copy /paste highlighted accounts from the Account Selector to captions in the template design workspace.

Removing, Adding, and Changing Captions

To remove a caption, click Delete on the window options (right-click) menu.

To insert a caption, click insert on the window options (right-click) menu.

To change the text of a caption or to change the category of accounts that appear under the caption, highlight the caption and press F2 or right-click for the window options menu, and then select Properties.