A generalized financial statement function is incorporated into the General Ledger system to provide ad hoc reports in a familiar accounting format. It provides extended flexibility in combining account information so that most financial reports for the organization can be produced on the computer. It can also be used to compensate for inconsistent account numbering in management reporting.
Financial statement generation is a two phase process. The first phase is to define the composition of lines to appear on the report. Once a set of lines have been defined they are stored and can be recalled at any time. The second phase is to set up and produce the actual report. The reports are of a semi-fixed format. During setup a predefined set of lines is identified as the base for the report. The contents of many report formats are either current month, or year-to-date and each line shows the corresponding totals for this year, last year, and budget. Once the report is set up it is printed immediately. The setup is not stored, so it must be redone each time the report is to be printed. The line of the report must be constructed in detail. A line is of one of several types:
A detail line may be printed on the report, or may only exist to define part of the contents of the subsequent total line. The sequence of detail lines need not bear any relation to the Chart of Accounts.
Detail lines define account ranges -- if a new account is added in a range defined for a detail line, it will automatically be included the next time the report is run. When a new account is added to the Chart of Accounts, every report that it will affect is in effect updated immediately.
Extra work is required only when the new account is not part of any defined range on a report, or it is not reported in the range that includes it now. In this case the existing single line would have to be replaced by two or more lines -- one for the range below the new account and one for the range above the new account.