CenterPoint® Accounting for Agriculture - Understanding and Using Financial Analysis

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Financial Analysis Overview Video - Duration: 7 min 40 sec

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Understanding and analyzing your data should be one of the main reasons for recording your day-to-day entries in CenterPoint Accounting. Financial Analysis is a tool that can be used to examine your data in past, present and future. The transactions entered into CenterPoint provide the historical information that can be analyzed with Financial Analysis. Financial Analysis allows you to modify the view of the data for easy analysis, including looking at all 12 months individually in one screen.

The data in a financial analysis is organized into three separate tabs:

Flow of Funds - Reports the transaction activity to all accounts. Does not include beginning balances for Balance Sheet accounts. The Flow of Funds tab can be viewed four ways:

  • Cash Level - cash receipts and cash payments coming into or leaving your company/fund.
  • AR/AP Level - promised funds in the form of Accounts Receivable/Payables created.
  • Journal Entry Level - represents non-cash movements of financial values.
  • Combined Level - totals the Cash, Credit, and Journal Entries together.

Balance Sheet - Represents the financial position of the company/fund at any point in time. The equation for the Balance Sheet is Assets = Liabilities + Owner's Equity. The Balance Sheet includes two account levels, Book Value (the calculated value affected by transaction activities) and Fair Market Value (the position of the company/fund if it were to sell today).

Income Statement - Is an accrual report that represents the profit of the company/fund for the time span specified. Determining the profit of the company/fund needs to reflect all money earned by the company/fund. It measures the difference between operating income and operating expenses.

In this topic, we'll provide information on how to:

Note: To properly set security restrictions for Financial Analysis users (you can restrict users from viewing/entering/changing transaction information for specific companies, profit centers, production centers, and projects ) Administrators need to also disallow users access to Transaction Search. If a user is not also restricted from Transaction Search, they will be able to drill down on cells and see all data in Financial Analysis. See the Users and Security topic for information about creating users, user groups, and setting security policies.

Create an Analysis that Includes Actual Amounts (Book Values)

  1. Select Reporting Tools > Financial Analysis.
  2. Click New.

  1. Enter a Name that describes the analysis.
  2. Select the date range for this analysis in the From/To fields
  3. Select the appropriate Companies/Funds. One or more companies/funds can be included in a single analysis.
  4. All Budgets for selected companies/funds and time period will be displayed. If you will be including budget information in this analysis (optional), select the appropriate budget(s) to be included in this analysis.
  5. If you are using account numbers in your database and would like to include them in the Financial Analysis screen, select Include Account Numbers.
  6. If you chose to Include Account Numbers, in the Order By box, select the way you want the account numbers ordered, by Account Name or AccountNumber.
  7. Click OK to display the financial analysis. At this point, only the actual (book value) data will be displayed.

  1. By default the data will be displayed for each month specified. If you prefer to view quarterly or annual numbers instead, select Format > Predefined Layouts and choose the appropriate option (Monthly, Quarterly or Annual).

Print a Financial Analysis

  1. With an existing financial analysis displayed, select File > Page Setup.
  1. On the Page tab, specify the Orientation.
  2. Specify the correct margins on the Margins tab.
  3. On the Sheet tab, Column Headings are selected to print by default the first time the Page Setup screen is displayed; if changed, the new setting is saved as the default. If the checkbox is changed on a subsequent Financial Analysis, the new setting is saved and used only for the current Financial Analysis session..
  1. Click Print or Print Preview.

or to print or preview without reviewing Page Setup:

  1. With an existing financial analysis displayed, select File > Print or click complete the Print screen, and then click Print. To view the analysis prior to printing, select File > Print Preview or click , review the analysis and then click Print.

Edit Actual (Book Values) from within Financial Analysis

If you notice that an actual (book value) is incorrect while in the financial analysis, it can easily be modified without leaving the analysis screen.

  1. Right-click on a value found in an Actual column and select Edit, or simply double- click on a value found in an Actual column.
  2. The Transaction Search screen will display all entries that make up the Actual amount that was selected in step 1.
  3. To modify a transaction, right-click and choose Edit or simply double-click on the transaction and the transaction will be displayed. It can then be modified, deleted or voided as needed. Once the modifications are complete, click Save.
  4. Close the Transaction Search screen.
  5. Back in the Financial Analysis screen, select Edit > Refresh Data to update the financial analysis with the changes made in
    step 3.

Frequently Used Modifications

Insert a Column of Data

  1. Select Format > Columns.
  2. Select the New button to add a new column that displays either actual (book values), budget numbers or a calculated amount.
  3. Use the green arrow up and down buttons to move the new column to the appropriate area in the analysis.

Adjust Column Width

The width of a column can be adjusted by moving your mouse in the shaded area between column headings. Once it's in the area between the two column headings the mouse pointer will change to a left/right arrow. Left-click and drag to the right to make the column larger, or to the left to make the column smaller. Double-clicking on the heading of a column will force it to automatically resize to the smallest width that will still display the data properly.

Note: If you'd like to resize multiple columns at once, click on the heading of the first column to change. Then, while holding the shift key down on the keyboard, click on the last column to resize. This will highlight all columns. Then move the mouse to the right of the last column selected and drag left or right to resize all selected columns at once.

 

View with Book or Market Value Data

If you already have the columns in the date range and order that you want, you can apply this quick formatting option which will toggle between book value and market value on the Balance Sheet.

  1. In an open analysis on the View menu, point to Values, and then click Book Value or Fair Market Value.
  2. At the "Display Book Value or Fair Market Value in Balance Sheet?" message, click Yes.

View with Actual/BudgetData

If you already have the columns in the date range and order that you want, you can apply this quick formatting option which will toggle between actual and budget data.

  1. In an open analysis, on the View menu, point to Data, and then click Actual or Budget..
  2. At the "Change all Columns to Display Actual/Budget Data?" message, click Yes.

Filter Data

By default all data is included in a financial analysis. The data can be filtered to include information for a specific area of your business. Data can be filtered by Profit/Cost Center, Production Year, Production Series, Production Center or Project.

  1. To apply a filter to all columns in an analysis, select View > Filters.

  1. Select the detail to filter by on the left in the Select a Filter box.
  2. Once the field is selected on the left (in this example we selected Profit/Cost Center), the available options for that field will be displayed on the right. Move each option to include in this analysis to the Selected box on the right.
  3. Click the Add Filter button.
  4. Select Apply to update the analysis with the new filtered information. Return to View > Filters to clear the filter (click Clear to clear the filter and click Close to cancel out of the filtering options) or select a different filter.

Columns can also be filtered by specific data, for example you may want to filter a column by Company/Fund so you can compare multiple companies/funds on the same analysis on the Balance Sheet tab.

  1. Select the column you want to filter.
  2. Select Format > Columns.
  3. Click the Filters button.
  4. Select the detail to filter by on the left in the Select a Filter box.

  1. Once the field is selected on the left (in this example we selected Company/Fund), the available options for that field will be displayed on the right. Move each option to include in this analysis to the Selected box on the right.
  2. Click the Add Filter button.
  3. Select Apply to update the analysis
  4. Return to Format > Columns > Filters to clear the filter (click Clear to clear the filter and click Close to cancel out of the filtering options) or select a different filter.

Include a Calculation in a Column

Columns can be added to an analysis that are calculations instead of amounts from actual transactions or budgets. For example, if you wanted a column that showed you the difference between the budget and actual amounts. The calculations can involve amounts or percentages.

In this example, we'll start with an analysis that includes quarterly actual and budget amounts. We'll add a column that calculates the difference between YTD actual and YTD budget.

  1. Create a new or open an existing analysis.
  2. Select Format > Columns. Select New to add a new column.

  1. Enter an appropriate heading in the Title field.
  2. Select Calculated Column and in the Calculation field, select the appropriate option. In our example, we'll use Difference as we want to calculate the difference between the two YTD columns.

  1. Double-click on the first column to be included in the calculation.

Note: CenterPoint will display a green, circled number one next to the column title after it's selected.

  1. Double-click on the column that should be subtracted from the first column selected. The calculation will display in the Formula box. Click OK.
  2. Click OK on the main Columns screen and the new calculated column will be added to the analysis.
If a calculated column contains the red text "#error: ###", the formula entered was not a valid equation.

Condense the Analysis

  • The rows that have all zero dollar amounts in a financial analysis can be hidden by selecting View > Hide Zero Rows. When activity is entered across months that total zero for the Calculated Total column, the Hide Zero Rows selection will not consider the row a zero row and display the row.
  • The columns that have all zero dollar amounts can be hidden also. Select View > Hide Zero Columns.

Round Amounts

The dollar amounts in a financial analysis can be displayed with or without cents. To turn this option on and off, select View > Show Cents.

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