Drilling for Information

Abstract

Click on a number in a financial report and get all the details. In the late 1980s, most accountants put aside their columnar pads and calculators and advanced to computers. In some respects, that was a big step, but in reality, very little actually changed: The financial reports were simply transferred from paper to the computer screen. Although the efficiency of report generation was improved, the reports were still static and what you saw on the screen, just as what you saw on the paper, was what you got. Unless extra information was added in a footnote or an addendum, there was no way such a static report--whether it was prepared on paper or on the computer--would show where any of the numbers came from or how they were calculated. Today's technology has given financial managers the opportunity to make reports both interactive and multidimensional. Mind you, we're not talking about leading-edge or tomorrow's technology. Set up properly, Microsoft Excel call allow financial report viewers to dig below the surface of a statement and uncover the source of any number and how it was calculated--in effect, to add new dimensions to otherwise static reports. The technique is commonly called drill-down functionality. Previously, we described how to distribute financial reports throughout an organization electronically rather than on paper (see Financial Reports in a Snap, JofA, Apr. 00, page 31). Once freed from the paper medium, reports also can become dynamic and interactive. This article demonstrates how to achieve drill-down functionality by creating an interactive selling, general and administrative (SGA exporting as a comma-delimited flat file works well. The minimum fields you need to export are month, department number, account number, account description, transaction description and transaction amount. Import this file into an Access table to which you keep appending the current month's data. The table should contain all the fields you export from the general ledger. …