Financial Statement Wizard - Introduction

The Financial Statement wizard walks you through the process of designing financial statements for your company. At every point in the process, the wizard makes your design choices clear; you know exactly what effect each choice will have on the finished product.

While the Financial Statements Design window gives you more individual control over each aspect of the financial design process, it’s probably a good idea to start designing with the Financial Statement Wizard. That way, you’ll have a better grasp of the basic elements of a statement and how to put them together effectively. Once you learn how the wizard builds a statement, designing financial statements on your own will become less of a challenge.

Using the Financial Statement Wizard

First, the wizard lets you name the statement you're creating and choose an existing financial statement design to use as the model for your new statement. Then you tell the wizard how to customize the new statement to meet your needs.

The Financial Statement wizard includes:

Headers and Footers: Headers and footers are text that repeats on each page of the displayed or printed statement. Headers appear at the top of the statement and can include your company name, the name of the report, and the report date, among other information. Footers appear at the bottom of the statement and can contain special notices to readers of the statement, such as "For management purposes only."

Enter the text of each header and footer you want to include. Tell me more about entering headers and footers.

Dates and General Ledger Account Masking: Choose the range of dates you want the statement to cover. Then, if you have set up your general ledger accounts for department masking, you can enter an account mask that will limit reporting to just one of your departments. Tell me more about choosing dates and setting up account masking.

Column Properties: Your new statement can have as many as 30 columns of data, and you can select the type of data that will appear in each column. Then you can set column properties that will tell Sage 50 how you want that data to appear. Tell me more about setting up column properties.

Column Options: For each type of column you set up in your statement, you can choose the following: whether to include a second title for the column, the width in characters and alignment of the column, and whether the column will print on reports or stay hidden. Tell me more about setting up column options.

Fonts: You can choose the fonts that Sage 50 uses to display or print each of the sections of your statement, such as headers, footers, and titles. Tell me more about choosing fonts.

Formatting and Default Printer: Finally, you can tell Sage 50 how to format your new statement: whether you want to print page numbers, show zero dollar amounts, center the report on the page, and so forth. You can also tell Sage 50 which printer to use as default for printing the statement. Tell me more about formatting the report and choosing a default printer.

Starting the Financial Statement Wizard

1. From the Reports & Forms menu, select Financial Statements.
2. When the Select a Report or Form window appears, select the Financial Statement Wizard button.

   Sage 50 displays the Financial Statement Wizard - Introduction window.

3. Read the introductory information.
4. To continue designing the new financial statement, click Next.

   Sage 50 displays the Financial Statement Wizard - Financial Statement Name window.