Multi-Column Income Statements

Although the income statement frequently reports on the current year data only, it is also common to have the income statement show multiple years or even break down a single year into individual months or quarters. Having the income statement show multiple columns adds another level of difficulty to the report design.

When you want a report to summarize data across multiple columns, you need to use the cross-tab object. In most circumstances, cross-tabs are fairly easy to create and add to a report. But income statements have rules that need to be followed and adhering to these rules is more difficult within the confines of the cross-tab object. A basic cross-tab object simply can’t be used to create an income statement. Fortunately, if you recall from Chapter 13 on cross-tabs, we covered advanced techniques for analyzing and manipulating the data that is printed within each cross-tab cell. These advanced techniques make it possible for us to use the cross-tab object to build a multi-column income statement.

While cross-tab objects make it possible to create a multi-column income statement, they do have three specific limitations:

• The formatting is limited when compared to being able to place objects anywhere within the report designer. It’s much easier to place objects wherever you want within the report designer than formatting individual cells in the cross-tab object.
• A standard report lets you drill-down on the report data for more detailed information. Cross-tab objects don’t have drill-down capabilities.
• Using the advanced formatting techniques of the cross-tab object requires being very comfortable with building cross-tab objects. Although this appendix will give you all the steps necessary for building the income statement, a certain skill level is still required to be able to apply the steps to your own report.

The next few tutorials walk you through the steps of creating a single year income statement as well as a multi-year income statement using the cross-tab object. Since both of these reports display the same information, they will be using the same formulas. Rather than repeat these steps in each tutorial, I’m going to have you create a base report which has all the necessary formulas in it and save it as “Income Statement Template.rpt”. It won’t display any data on it, but you can use it as the starting point for creating both types of income statements which will actually display the data.

The difference between the income statement in this chapter and the one that you will write for your company is in the sections and categories used. You will either have more categories or they might be named differently. Fortunately, this is controlled through a single formula and is easy to modify. So that aspect shouldn’t present you with any problems and most of what you do in this tutorial should be directly applicable to your own reports.

Since the design of the income statement is very similar to the design of the balance sheet, many of the steps in the next tutorial are identical to the balance sheet tutorial. Although for many of you this information will be redundant, there are many people who will have jumped directly to this tutorial without working through the balance sheet tutorial. Because of this, I’m going to keep the same commentary in both tutorials for the benefit of those who only read one of them. If you’ve already been through the balance sheet tutorial, feel free to skip over some of the notes if you recognize them. Just be sure not to skip any of the detail steps so that your income statement will work correctly.