Drilldown on reports

Use Freeze to Create Static Reports

Updating XLGL 4.0 Reports for Simply Accounting

2010 Simply Accounting Partnership Conference

We just spend the end of last week at the 2010 Simply Accounting Partnership Conference. What a blast! I’ll pass over the cowboys and dancing on the table, and move straigh to XLGL.

For the first time, we showed XLGL 4.0 to a live audience. Feedback was really encouraging; seems we’re on the right track. (a preview of XLGL 4.0 is available on YouTube)

The most popular improvement was, by far, the list formatting. In XLGL 3.0, you have to format list using specific Excel styles or you lose all formatting the next time you refresh. Very frustrating.

Not only is this not a problem anymore in version 4.0, but XLGL also looks at those changes and apply them all over the layout for a consistent look.

Next in line was the Freezing feature, which is now applied to the entire workbook by default and does not remove your formulas, only XLGL specific formulas.

As for new features, the ability to navigate the entire company data using a simple drag and drop interface blew everyone away. For some, when I showed how to build a complete Pivot Table with a few click, starting with nothing, it was all they needed to see to believe how XLGL is innovative compared to other products.

Not far behind was the new parameter autofill feature for worksheet function. That one is still in development, but it’s sure to be a very popular feature. Or not, as most people won’t even know it’s there while fully enjoying its benefits.

No, we did not show everything. There are still some surprise. We will continue our releases of preview videos until the ship date.

Thanks to everyone who made XLGL such a success, and thank you for your patience. XLGL 4.0 will be available soon.

Pierre Alain



XData and Family

Today, I’d like to introduce the new XData family of functions. Although these functions will be perfected and used later in higher level tools, they can be put to profit right now by advanced user to fetch any data from the database.

XData, XDataLookup and XDataCondition were introduced in version 2.9.9 of XLGL. XData is used to fetch data from database table. For example:

=XData("tCustomr", "sName", 1)

will return the name of the first customer in the database. The field name can be replaced by expression, such as:

=XData("tCustomr", "SUBSTRING(sName, 1, 5)+'.'", 1)

will return the first 5 characters of the first customer name followed by a dot (.). Aggregate functions can also be used. For example:

=XData("tCustomr", "COUNT(sName)")

will return the number of customer in the table.

You may have notice that the third argument is the index in the table of the record we want. Most of the time, you don’t know the index of the row you want. This is where XDataLookup and XDataCondition comes in.

=XDataLookup("tCustomr", "sName", "Ashburton Reinforcing")

will return the index of the customer named Ashburton Reinforcing, which can then be used in the XData function to retrieve other information on that customer:

=XData("tCustomr", "sCity", XDataLookup("tCustomr", "sName", "Ashburton Reinforcing"))

Of course, you can put both function in difference cells and reference them.

Sometime XDataLookup will return more than one index. For example:

=XDataLookup("tCustomr", "sCity", "Richmond")

will return the index of all the customer whose reside in Richmond. You can then get a count of these by using:

=XData("tCustomr", "COUNT(sName)", XDataLookup("tCustomr", "sCity", "Richmond"))

XDataCondition returns indices in the same manner but using any custom condition. For example:

=XDataCondition("tCustomr", "sName LIKE 'A*'")

will return the indices of all all customer that have a name starting with A.

In an upcoming post, we’ll look at how to use the XData family of function to create your own powerful worksheet functions.

XLGL and VBA

A question we are receiving more and more lately is: Can XLGL functions be called from VBA (Visual Basic for Application). The answer is Yes.

This is an advanced topic and, if you’re not familiar with VBA, you may be tempted to skip it. However, knowing a little VBA can save you tons of work on repetitive tasks. Starting with this post, we’ll talk more about XLGL and VBA, particularly the ability to create your own Worksheet Functions.

Although XLGL is not fully implement in VBA, it is still possible to call any functions by using Application.Run. For example:

Amount = Application.Run("XGL", "1020")

will return in variable Amount, the current balance of Account 1020.

The first parameter to Application.Run is always the function’s name followed by any function parameter you provide.

Menu command can be called in the same fashion. For example, to recalculate the workbook using XLGL Recalculate command:

Application.Run "XLGL__Recalculate"

To Refresh:

Application.Run "XLGL__Refresh"

This should give you a good head start on using XLGL with VBA. In further posts, we’ll look at custom worksheet function and answer any question we receive on the subject.

Financial Reporting #3

This is the last post of this series on basics of financial reporting with XLGL. So far, we have seen how to import financial figure using the XGLP (P stands for period) and XGL (to fetch the balance at a given date). Today we’ll see how to get budgeted amounts from the GL.

The name of the worksheet function is XGLBudgets (I’m sure you guessed that one) and it works very much like XGLP. Here are some examples:

=XGLBudgets(4010, “August”)

will return the budget amount for account 4010 in August of the current fiscal year.

=XGLBudgets(“5010, 5020″, “First Quarter”, “Second Quarter”, “0100″)

will return the total budget amount for accounts 5010  and 5020, and department 0100,  between the beginning of the first quarter and the end of the second quarter of the current fiscal year.

The function can be created using the XLGL console or using the Excel Insert Function wizard as explained in Financial Reporting #1.

As you may know, Simply Accounting requires you to define a budgeting period for your company: Monthly, Bi-Monthly, Quarterly, etc. When reporting using XLGL, you do not have to restrict yourself to these period. For example, if your budget are set as Monthly, you can still use the following function:

=XGLBudgets(4010, “First Quarter”)

In this case, XLGL will simply add the budget for the first three month of the year and return the result.

What if your situation is the opposite? You are using Quarterly budgets in Simply Accounting and want to report Monthly, as in:

 =XGLBudgets(4010, “August”)

By default, XLGL will use linear interpolation to calculate the budget. In this case, XLGL will return the proportional equivalent for August. Note that this won’t be exactly a third of the budget because XLGL interpolate using daily calculation. As August as 31 days, it will have a bigger budget than September.

Beside linear interpolation, you can also decide to clamp up or down the returned value, that is return the complete amount either when the period is partly present or only when the period is completely included, or using cubic interpolation. Cubic interpolation will take into account budgets from previous and following period to calculate acceleration or deceleration and return a more precise figure.

In summary, the XGLBudgets function will cover all budgeting scenario easily. Although we did not talk about it, it will also cover project budgeting.

Do you have a budgeting problem? Would you like to know more about project budgeting? Let us know!

Financial reporting #2

Last time we saw that using the XGLP function we can fetch any figures from the GL related or not to other module. One thing that XGLP won’t do is return an account balance.

With XGLP, you can leave the beginning of the period empty and use only an end date to retrieve a pseudo-balance. It is not a real balance because it does not use starting balance. XLGL only adds transaction amount, not starting balance for account/department.

You can still use the method above to get the balance for a project, or a vendor, but when you need the exact balance for an account or account-department, you must use XGL.

XGL is very similar to XGLP, only with fewer arguments. Here is an example:

=XGL(1020, “12/31/2008″, “0100″)

will return the balance for account 1020, department 0100 on December 31st 2008. XGL take only one date as it returns a balance. XGL will take your starting balance and add transactions amount up to the date you request.

This is the function you would use to create a Balance sheet for example.

There is one thing concerning the GL we still have to look at and that is Budget. Next time, we’ll look at the new XGLBudgets function as it related to the GL.

Financial Reporting #1

When doing financial reporting, you usually want to report some monetary figures from the General Ledger (GL) over a period or at a certain date.

Using traditional and general purpose reporting tools such as Crystal Report or Ms Query, you would need to create a custom query using multiple tables. This can become complex rapidly even when you’re not using Departments or projects.

Although XLGL has custom querying tools as well, it offers a nice alternative, both easier to use and more flexible: the worksheet function.

An XLGL worksheet function is a regular Excel worksheet function. It takes parameters, does some calculation and return a result in a cell. The only difference is that the XLGL function will fetch data from your Simply Accounting file as needed to perform its calculation.

For example, entering the following formula in a cell:

=XGLP(4010, “August”)

will return the amount of all transaction posted to account 4010 in August of the current fiscal year. Of course, the account number and the period can reside in other cell that you reference in your function:

=XGLP($A4,$ C$1)

Although you can learn the function and parameter name, XLGL offers a nice drag and drop interface integrated with Excel. You can drag a function, drop it in a cell, set up the parameter using an easy Wizard and then copy the formula to other part of the worksheet.

 

The following online videos shows how to build a complete Income Statement using this method:

http://www.logicimtech.com/learnxlgl.aspx

Here are some more example of how the XGLP function can be used:

=XGLP(“Revenue”, “August”, “December”, “0100″)

will return the total amount for all revenue accounts using department 0100 for transaction made between August and December.

=XGLP(“5010, 5020″, “First Quarter”,,,”ACME Novelty Ltd.”)

will return all purchase made at ACME Novelty Ltd. in account 5010 and 5020 in the first quarter of the current fiscal year.

Of course, the power of the worksheet function is best shown not in its individual use, but when use to create a full report (see video above). Once you have report finished in this way, you can just change the period to update everything very rapidly.

Next time, we’ll continue our financial reporting tour with another function use to get the balance of an account.

Is there some type of financial reporting you think would be difficult to do using this method? Let us know!