FRx Safety and Sorting

By Duke Swenson, Systematic Solutions Inc

SAFETY

How much time and effort have you put into your rows, columns, and trees of your FRx reports? How can you safeguard against losing your financial reporting structures? These are two very important questions.

FRx stores your reporting elements, the rows, columns, trees, and catalog of reports in a single file. We refer to this file as the specification set or ‘Spec Set’. There are two areas within FRx which contain information relating to the Spec Set. The Company Information screen defines which Spec set is active for a given company.

In order to review your spec set file, open the Company Information screen that you use. Notice the name of the spec set in the FRx System Information tab

Close this screen and open the Specification Sets screen and using the Find button, select your spec set name. In the Location box of the Specification Set Screen, the path and file name of your spec set is defined. The file has a file type of .F32. This is your bag of gold.

This file should be copied to a second location by using Copy and Paste. This process will only take a few minutes to complete and it could save you hours of grief trying to recreate your financial reports.

SORTING

I have heard from several Solomon users that the FRx reports can be very difficult to read because of the amount of detail they print in the row format. I have an interesting solution to your needs.

When I look at some detailed income statements, the expense section lists the expense accounts by account number. The group of expenses can be reorganized line by line to give the report some sense of order. This could take you some time to complete. A quicker way is to use one of the built in functions of the FRx Row Format screen; the SORT and ASORT.

The SORT function allows you to sort the defined section by one on the columns in the report’s associated Column Layout. The following are some simple guidelines when using sorts;

a) The Sort command must appear in the row format above the section to be sorted.

b) Define the Format Code as SORT in column C

c) Define the range of rows in column D

d) Define the column letter from the associated column layout in column G

e) When using a Reporting Tree, each unit will sort independently.

The associated Column Layout has the Description column as Column A.

The result is that the section is sorted in ascending order, in this case, alphabetically.

The idea is to keep the reports easy to read and informative. Sorting your operating expenses can help you meet this goal.