Lots of things to consider if you’re recreating your Excel financials in FRx. Here’s what makes the short list.
As an aside, a lot of reports are in Excel because they contain statistical information that’s not in the GL. Can you book this information to the GL? It will make your life simpler.
1. Biggest thing to consider is this: it’s waaayyy too easy to make manual adjustments to financials in Excel. If anything has been ‘tweaked’, shall we say, do those entries need to hit the GL? If yes, make the entries before starting the FRx reports. Otherwise your FRx reports won’t tie back to your Excel financials. If no tweaks have been made, you should be good to go.
2. Might want to use a development spec set so the new reports aren’t mixed with existing.
3. Create an FRx trial balance first. Make sure it balances, then tie it back to Excel.
3. Review the Excel reports. How many? How detailed?
4. Develop the naming convention.
5. Sometimes I will use the existing Excel financials as a starting point for creating the row format for FRx. Just sort of depends. You can start the row in Excel and take advantage of the concatenate function to add spaces before descriptions if indents are needed. Also take advantage of the spell check while you’re still in Excel! Note that Excel’s indent function won’t work when you copy it into FRx.
6. Nor will bolding. You can worry about fonts and such later. Most important thing right now is accuracy.
7. Once you copy the row format into FRx, then you can add underscore, totals, currency, and the like.
8. Set up the report to run and use exception reporting to see if anything is missing.
9. Does it tie back to Excel? Or the initial trial balance? This sort of goes without saying, but make sure you’re running it for the correct period. (Duh! Apologies!) Easy mistake to make.
10. Now you can start fooling with cosmetics. Create the fonts that will give the reports the look you want and apply it consistently to each succeeding report.
Repeat 5-10 as needed!
Hopefully this will get you started!
So how did you physically tie this to a spreadsheet? Where and how do you do this?
Hi Dean,
This post is more about having monthly financials in Excel and needing to create them in FRx, so there’s no real link to Excel in this instance. You can definitely tie to a spreadsheet, though, as part of FRx’s inherent capabilities. There are 2 different methods that are used depending on the circumstances; both are detailed in FRx help. Good luck…Jan