Take a tour of Financial Statements

Learn about the key elements of the Financial Statements user interface (UI).

In Phocas, when you open a financial database via your homepage, dashboard, or some other means, it opens in the Financial Statements module.

Watch this Phocas Academy video: Take a tour of Financial Statements

Financial Statements has the following key elements, as identified by the numbers in the image.

1. Grid

The grid is where you view and analyze the information from the selected financial statement.

The grey rows are the categories (groups), like Revenue and Expenses in a Profit and Loss or Assets and Liabilities in a Balance Sheet.

• You can expand these categories to view the underlying accounts and drill down into individual transactions.

  
• By default, the General Ledger accounts within the groups are displayed in ascending code order. You can switch between descending and ascending sort order as required. When the groups are expanded, right-click any row within a group and click Sort Ascending or Sort Descending. Even though you change the sort order for a particular group, for consistency purposes, the accounts in all groups are sorted in the same way.

  

The white rows are the calculations. These rows are not expandable nor do they have transactions.

2. Menus

The toolbar on the top has several menus you can use to switch between your financial statements and customize your view of each one.

3. Dimensions, and related actions

The panel on the left has the following elements:

• Dimensions: View the list of dimensions in your underlying database. A dimension is a level in your statement and an entity is a value within a dimension. For example, a dimension is Country and the entities are Australia, the UK and the USA. Users who have permission to manage financial statements can create custom dimensions to add a level of detail that was not in the original dataset. Use these dimensions to add levels to the statement grid and filter the data to focus on specific information. If you click a dimension, you move into the Analytics grid, where you can drill deeper into your data, all the way down into the transaction level. To remove this list and get a better view of the statement, click the Hide dimensions button below the grid)

• Focus, Reset, and Summary buttons: Use the buttons above the dimension list to focus on specific entities within a dimension, reset the grid to the default view, or return to the summary (high-level) view of the data.

• Levels: Drag dimensions into the Levels box to add them as levels in the grid and create a nested view of the information and view the information at a more granular level. For example, add the Country dimension as a level to view the contribution of each country to the overall performance.

• Column groups: Use the Column groups feature with selected dimensions to transform the grid into a matrix format and view the entities side-by-side. For example, select the Country dimension, then select three countries to view financial information for those countries in separate columns in the grid, alongside the combined information in the Total column.

4. Other actions

The toolbar on the top has the following action buttons:

• Charts: Visualize the data in the grid in a chart format.

• Export: Export the data into Microsoft Excel or as a PDF.

• Settings: Access the settings for advanced features, such as the currency settings and groups.