Financial Reports

Question

Post Author: SMCook
CA Forum: General
Hi.
I am new to Crystal Reports and hope someone out there with experience writing P&L reports can help with this:  We are planning to use Crystal Reports a our reporting engine for all of our financial reports.   I am trying to distinctly identify columns that sit side by side on the same report.  We have an 18-column P&L report in which there is a column for every calendar month which is to be populated by either the  "actual amount"  or the forecasted amount,  a total yr actual/forecast column, a total yr budget column a total last year column, plus 2 variance columns.  (The first column is for the line item description.)  I am unable to get just the "actuals" to work on this report:    When I try to define each column as equal to the amount associated with a specific "GL_Period",  where "2007-12", "2007-11" are stored values in the GL_Period field, the previous column's select statement is overwritten with the current column's select statement, resulting in duplicate data, not comparative data.  We have also thought of creating a view, but 72 columns (the actuals columns for current year and prior year are actually each made up of 2 columns, a debit amount and a credit amount)  doesn't sound like the best way to go about this). 
What really bothers me is I want to write this report using crosstabs, but what I run into there is crosstabs wants to sort the line descriptions alphabeticallythere is a  unique line # associated with each line description, I would like to present the line descriptions on the report but sort by the line number.  (I understand that you can "specify" the line number, but our "detail" 12 period  P& L report has 649 lines!!Its sort of a detail P&L trial balance by account and department)
If anyone has an easy solution to either of these questions, I would love to hear it.

Answer 1

Post Author: SMCook
CA Forum: General
The reports in the financial tab are exactly what I feel I should be creating--they are done in crosstabs.  However, I need something to bridge me from the tutorial crosstab report (which is not anything like a financial report) to the financial report and I didn't get enough information from chapter 17 on crosstabs to get there.  Most general ledgers these days are designed along similar lines.  Isn't there someone else out there who is creating financial reports in Crystal where it is fairly common to have several columns of information all related to the same row (year over year, budget actual, month to month, current month to year to date?
In the example below, the amount or "XX" fields come from the same table or are calculated.  I am using a budget/actual format instead of  the 16-column discussed above as the problem is the same:  I am going to the same field in the general ledger table, the "period" field, and attempting to select it differently for two different columns.  With the "current month" vs year-to-date, I am trying to add up all of the months selected for the year to date, but only use one month for the current month.  So far I can do either, but not both?  Should I set this up as 2 separate subreports that would be presented side by side (vertically)?   Still won't answer the 12 period question, though.Example:
                      Cur Mo Act   Cur Mo Bud  Diff      YTD Act   YTD Bud   Diff
Revenues        XXXXX                 XXXXX    (XX)        XXXXX       XXXXX     XXX
COGS                XXX                    XXX      XX        XXXXX       XXXXX    XXXX
SGA                   XXX                   XXX        X         XXXXX      XXXXX      XXX
Net Income        XXXX                   XXX      XX         XXXXX      XXXXX        XX