Show balances only at the first row in Discoverer.

Question

I have a discoverer report based on Oracle GL module. I'm reporting the balances @ segment1,2&3 which gives Journal date, Begining balance , Journal amount and Ending balances. I'm able to pull in all the data. But the user wants enters the parameter as From period, To period and the segment1,2&3. Here is the data which is showing in my report currently.
segment info 1-2-3 journal name Journal Date Begin Balance journal Amount Ending Balance
931-11-11 abcd 09-SEP-2009 21,492,527.51 ; -506,290.00 23,875,304.30
931-11-11 abcd 09-SEP-2009 21,492,527.51 ; 1,996,600.00 23,875,304.30
931-11-11 abcd 30-NOV-2009 22,982,837.51 ; 333.58 25,365,614.30
931-11-11 abcd 30-NOV-2009 22,982,837.51 ; -2,600,200.00 25,365,614.30
931-11-11 abcd 30-NOV-2009 22,982,837.51 ; -166.79 25,365,614.30
931-11-11 abcd 31-DEC-2009 23,373,134.30 ; -495,865.00 25,755,911.09
931-11-11 abcd 31-DEC-2009 23,373,134.30 ; 998,035.00 25,755,911.09
Users desired output is like this:
segment info 1-2-3 journal name Journal Date Begin Balance journal Amount Ending Balance
931-11-11 abcd 09-SEP-2009 *21,492,527.51* -506,290.00
931-11-11 abcd 09-SEP-2009 1,996,600.00
931-11-11 abcd 30-NOV-2009 333.58
931-11-11 abcd 30-NOV-2009 -2,600,200.00
931-11-11 abcd 30-NOV-2009 -166.79
931-11-11 abcd 31-DEC-2009 -495,865.00
931-11-11 abcd 31-DEC-2009 998,035.00 25,755,911.09
user wants see the beginning balance only @ the first period. He is not interested in showing up at each and every line.
Then ending balance is sum of the begining balance which is at the first line and sum of all the journal amount which should show up at the last line.
I don't know how to show begining only at the first period and ending balance at the last row. Please help!!!
Edited by: PA1B on Feb 18, 2010 11:54 AM
Edited by: PA1B on Feb 18, 2010 11:57 AM

Answer 1

Maybe you would come up with a custom folder that unions the GL Balance table to the GL JE Lines table? You would have to union a begiining balance entry to the JE detail. Not sure you would need an ending balance record. The beginning balance entry would have the first day of the month as its journal date value as part of the union coding, and journal name NULL. So that hopefully it will sort out as the first entry for the period. Though even that still provides an issue with crossing over multliple periods. You would have to add conditions that say that select the NULL journal name entry only if the journal date = the begin period begin date. Or as part of the union process you could create a new column with a flag for balance (Y for the beginning balance table records and N for the detail JE lines records) and use that new column for editing along with the begin date of the selected date range. Just trying to toss out some ideas here. I myself have never had to do sometihng like this, so I don't have a proven method to accomplish this. But think back to what happens when you join tables with SQL. You are getting a record today with begin balance, je detail line amount, and end balance, because you are joining gl balances to je detail. What you really want, I think is an SQL result that gives you the first result row being the beginning balance of the account of the user selected From Period, and then the following SQL row results are the detail JE rows. That way you only get the beginning balance to print one time, at the beginning, in the SAME column as the je detail amount, and you can then do a sum at the end of the account to sum up the Discoverer report detail rows that would give you an ending balance, again showing just one time for each account in the report. So you have to ask yourself this question - if I was writing this SQL myself (forget about Discoverer for the moment), how would I write it myself, manually, to get the desired result? Once you know how to code it manually, then that should give you a clue on how to set it up in Discovererer. Hope this helps a bit. Another thought - rather than use Discoverer, maybe look at the Oracle Finanacial Statement generator to handle this? Or maybe come up with some kind of materialized view (that might help performance, since GL detail lines table can get pretty darn large)? Keep in mind with a materialized view you get a non-current view of the data, so that won't work if you absolutely need to query over what is currently in the Oracle base tables. But if this is a once a month thing, you could refresh the materialized view after the period is closed and then the users can run the Discoverer report.
Good luck.
John Dickey