Financial Reports

We created a non-financial report in the last movie, but since NetSuite is a very capable accounting system, it only makes sense that we should go through creating a financial one in this video. Financial reports are very similar to their non-financial counterparts, so we will only cover the differences here. To create one you go to Reports and New Financial Report. From here you can select the type you want to create, that is, the layout of the report, from the most common financial report types. Those are the Balance Sheet, Statement of Cash Flows, and the Income Statement. The fact that these are what you can base financial reports off of, should give you an indication of what they are for. These are reports that accountants would use, but generally would not be used by most of the rest of the business. The setup of the different types is all going to be very similar. What is available for the layout will change a bit, and we will cover that. I’ll go ahead and select the Standard Balance Sheet here at the top. One of the first things we notice is that we don’t go through selecting fields and layouts to initially define the report. Rather, we are dropped directly into the report builder. Most of the options here at the top are the same as what they were for non-financial reports, however the Edit Layout is new. Let’s take a look. Here on the left, we have a listing of all of the categories, of assets and liabilities, we will report on. That is this section here. Here on the right are all of the fields that are related to what we will report on. So for example, I have assets listed here, but if you want to call this something else you can change the label. We can also change the summary label as well. The summary label is the label at the bottom where the group is totaled or subtotaled. Depending on what is selected, you may be able to change it to display as a child of something else, with this child of drop down. This way you can rearrange how accounts show up, but the ability to do this is limited, since placing an asset as a child of a liability would not make any sense, and the system won’t let you do this. You can select whether you want each row to start expanded or collapsed. What you pick here is usually going to depend on how many accounts and subaccounts you are reporting on. The more you have, the more likely you will be, to have the row collapsed to begin with. You could also set this so it could not be expanded. This would be useful if you were running a report that may show sensitive information, such as payroll. The information may not be sensitive in aggregate, but the individual entries may be. You can choose how the row summaries will calculate, usually dynamic, where they are just summed, is used most often. However, there may be times, when you may want to apply a custom formula, and you can do that here. The rest of the options below have more to do with the format. This may seem silly, but this will affect not just how a report is shown on screen, but also how it is exported. So, if you need to increase the font or make something look a little different you can do that here. These, like all the other fields, are set per category. If you spend some time with the formatting, you can get things to be very good-looking, directly out of NetSuite. Under Edit Columns there are some minor changes. Adding and moving fields around works the same as with other reports. Below we have the option to edit how some of the financial information is shown. For example, we can select if we want decimals to show or not, and if we want to show full amounts or perhaps divide the amounts by 1000, which is useful if we have very large amounts. The Alternate Period Range Type is used to compare data from one period to data from another period. The rest of these are all self-explanatory. Filters and Sorting are the same as for non-financial reports. More Options has a few extra selections. For example, you can select how drilling down will work, and where you will be taken when you drill down. Other than this, most things are the same. Let’s save this and take a look. This report looks very similar to the non-financial one, that we were looking at in the last video; though the data is different. One of the biggest differences we have is the ability to see more, or less filters down here. Just like the other report, we would need to refresh this, with the refresh button, after making filter changes. Just like the other one we can export, save, or send this one as well. So mostly, the financial reports are the same as non-financial with a few exceptions that we talked about. You should now have a more detailed understanding of some of the differences between financial and non-financial reports, and how to customize them to better suit your needs.