Alba Spectrum FRX Dynamics GP Consolidation in Financial Reporting

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
St. Joseph, Michigan, United States of America (Free-Press-Release.com) September 2, 2010 --

If you plan to deploy Microsoft Dynamics GP for large organization, including multinational corporation with international subsidiaries (where multicurrency is important), we would like to give you initial highlights. There is special tool: Enterprise Reporting (often referred as Solver) – this tool is outside of the scope of this publication. We will concentrate on more traditional and well known Financial Reporting Tool: FRx. Theoretically you can use other popular tools, such as Crystal Reports, Excel Reporting, SSRS (Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services), but the amount of work would be substantially higher, comparing to FRx, where you already have connector to Great Plains General Ledger Chart of Accounts and Transaction tables, plus you have all the necessary tools to handle multicurrency and consolidated reporting:

1. FRx Building Blocks. You begin your FRx introduction with Row Format (where you specify one account per row, or summary of the account group, plus roll-up summary lines for your Financial Statement section, such as Assets, Liabilities, Equity in Balance Sheet). When Row Format is ready, you deal with Column Layout (for example, if you like your Profit & Loss Statement to have 12 months spreadsheet form – these twelve columns and running summary column you define in Column Layout). Next element is Report Catalog (where you combine Row Format and Column Layout to form end report, such as Balance Sheet, P&L or Statement of Cash Flow). You can read more in FRx documentation or other articles about FRx, let’s now move to Consolidated Report design

2. Reporting Tree. This construction allows you to specify company (Dynamics GP database) for Tree Unit, for example Headquarters, Brazilian or Mexican subsidiary. Reporting Tree could be optionally specified in the Catalog, see description above. If Reporting Tree is specified, when you print your report, you will get dialogue to include the whole tree or pick subset of tree units. From Consolidated Financial Reporting theory you probably remember to exclude intercompany sales and purchasing (Due to and Due From GL Accounts)

3. Multicurrency. We recommend you to accept defaults for FRx for Microsoft Dynamics GP, where multicurrency is taken from GP multicurrency setup. If you like more flexibility (and related additional data entry work directly in FRx on exchange rates – this is also an option)

4. International Aspects of Financial Consolidation in FRx. If all your international subsidiaries run Microsoft Dynamics GP (and you are very organized IT manager and all these GP companies are hosted on the same Windows Server in your Headquarters and open to international users via Citrix) – just follow the guidelines above. But, it might be the case, that your international subsidiaries are in the countries, where Dynamics GP is not localized: Brazil, China, Russia (you can continue the roll). If that’s what you’ve got, you may consider two strategies. First one is to create separate company with the overseas subsidiary currency and only enter (or import via Integration Manager) posted GL transactions (this would be GL level shadow company strategy) – it is usually relatively simple to export General Ledger entries from any Accounting application and tune GL integration via Dynamics GP Integration Manager. Second approach is even more simple – in FRx Row Format you can specify Excel Worksheet as data source for the cell in a Row. And then you export from your overseas accounting Excel Worksheet (typically in the form of Balance Sheet or Income Statement or Trial Balance) – be sure the format is always the same in Excel (the same number of Columns, Rows and positioning of the cells) – and this is who you consolidate your foreign branch. Second approach is often preferred, when you have very small overseas branch and do not even have Accounting system there (all is done in Excel). Paragraphs below are more technical and you may review them with your IT consultant or computer support personnel

Andrew Karasev, Great Plains Dynamics GP and eEnterprise Certified Master, Microsoft MVP and consultant with 10 years and plus experience and expertise. Alba Spectrum, 1-866-528-0577, help@albaspectrum.com http://www.albaspectrum.com If you are thinking to implement Dynamics GP in challenging environment, we recommend you to give us a call. Our information portal is Pegas Planet http://www.pegasplanet.com