Reporting Features

Welcome back. In the last video, I introduced you to reports. In this video, I want to take a look at one specific report and show you some of the features that you'll see on most reports, especially financial reports.

So let's take a look. Just like in the last video, if we go to reports here in the navigation bar and we go down to financial. Right at the top here, we have income statement. So let's go there.

So here we are in an income statement. There are a few different things I'm going to show you here. And we're just going to kind of take around the clock counterclockwise and look at some of the key features for a report. First thing, we see the title up here. So we know what type of report we're looking at. And we have the ability to view detail.

So if we click on this, it gives us a view. Notice in here we have it broken down by these kind of accounts. But when we go to the view detail, suddenly every single account is broken down by every transaction that makes up that figure. So if we go to the bottom here of sales, we'll see a number 6 million. And if we go back here, that's 6 million. We'll see it again here.

So, you know, it's corresponding obviously, it's just a kind of broken down version of every single entry we see here. We also have the ability to click on anything here. And it will do the same thing, except instead of pulling up the details for everything, it will just pull up the details for that entry. So if I click sales, it'll pull up just those transactions for sales and still kind of show how they aggregate to that same figure that we see here, the 6 million.

So that's how these are kind of dynamic reports you can interact with them in that regard. And you also have these little buttons here where you can minimize or expand what's shown underneath them. And I'll show you a little bit more on that in a second.

But the next key thing to get into is down here at the bottom, we have the date and we have a time period. So obviously, if it's a year, it's showing, you know, from what period of a year to what period. So that's key to for most financial reports, you're going to want to know what date are you looking at, what time period or what exact date.

For example, if you're looking at a balance sheet and then if you go over here, you have this subsidiary. So if you have a multi subsidiary corporation, you might want to be able to check how certain subsidiaries are fairing or how they compare to each other. Say the options. You pull up that menu and choose any subsidiary that is applicable.

Next, we have column. Now this one is very helpful to use, especially a common use for it is to choose. You're basically given a number of different options so you can slice and dice this report by certain metrics. So do you want to do it by class? Do you want to break it down by department? Maybe if you're looking at expenses, you want to see how those break down by department. But a common one is to look at month. So especially if we're looking at an income statement that's looking at a year, we can now have it go into various columns by month.

So let's take a look at how that will break down. If any time you change anything in this blue bar at the bottom, you're going to want to hit refresh, which will then actually show you the results of that change. So let's hit refresh. And now suddenly, instead of just having one column showing the totals, we now have it broken down by month in every column. So again, that's a very common one for a lot of financial statements. And you can break down column a number of different ways. So that's a very helpful tool.

And then over here, you have a little quick search. You can locate any words or numbers anywhere on the report that are visible so that can be helpful. And I'm going to walk you through some of these buttons down here.

First off, this one here gives you the ability. Notice I pointed out earlier that you can kind of expand or contract some of the categories on the left there. But what you do here is if you click on it, it's going to crunch them all down. And you have the ability now over here to expand them. So it'll expand them by one this time. So you spend it out, it takes one hierarchy, one level, and it'll bring it down. You do it again, it'll pop it down another, do it again, it'll pop it down one more. And this time if you contract it, it will contract just by one. So if you want to very quickly, instead of having to click all those little pluses and minuses, if you want to just rapidly contract or expand those charts, you can easily hit those two.

Next, if you want to get some kind of visual aid as to what you're looking at, you do have this graph feature. So if you click on that, it'll just automatically pop up a little bar chart and you see you can specify what you're trying to look for, but you can also go down and just click a pie chart. So those can be very helpful just to get an immediate visual aid, especially if you're doing a demonstration, you can show, "Hey, this is the breakdown of the income statement."

Obviously, if you want to get into some more complicated visuals and graphs, things like saved searches and suite analytics will probably better serve your purposes. But that's just something you can have as an option.

Next, we have various exports and print functions. So if you want to export as an Excel file, as a PDF or word doc, a CSV file, you have all those options down here and of course to print or you can also have it print as a PDF. So all those options down here and you have the ability to email it, whether that's emailing it internally or if you have a report that's really related to a specific customer, you might have an instance where you want to send that the results of that report to that customer and you can do so through that button right down there.

And last we have the schedule button. So as I mentioned earlier, you can have a recurring schedule that just sends the results of this report to whomever is applicable in your instance. And that's it for basic reporting features.

I'll see you in the next video.

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