Adagio FX - Great Financial Statement Tool

Adagio FX - Enhanced Financial Reporting
For years, CPA's have been forced into one of two camps: live with the financial statement formatting offered in QuickBooks, or spend hours adding the final "finishing touches" to a client's financial statements in Excel. Adagio FX (www.GreatStatements.com) from Softrak Systems Inc. (www.softrak.com) is designed to allow consultants to quickly create presentation quality financial statements, and automate their production at month end and year end. Since our look at the product last year, Softrak has added several powerful new features, including the ability to import a fully formatted Excel spreadsheet into Adagio FX to provide a "running start" to statement creation. If you spend any amount of time every month formatting financial statements in Excel, Adagio FX deserves your consideration.

Adagio FX users enjoy the following benefits:

• Financial statements automatically adjust presentation to suppress inactive accounts, or move bank accounts between the Asset and Liability section of the balance sheet depending on account balance.
• Automatically highlight over or under budget accounts, or unusual variances to prior year.
• Instant feedback as the fiscal period and department selector is changed, with drill down to the posted transactions to explain figures.
• Automatic printing of entire "statement sets" at period end.
• Portability of financial statements between companies and organizations without complex account mapping.
• Statements combining multiple accounting datasets without recourse to Excel.

Report Specification Files

Each financial statement is defined in a separate specification file. Specification files may be copied from company to company and used "as is" if the chart of accounts is the same. Adagio FX also allows you to drag-and-drop directly from a company's chart of accounts onto a pre-formatted financial statement, making it simple to adopt a standardized set of statements for a broad range of clients. Adagio FX's cell, row and column formatting are similar to what you are used to when using Excel. In fact, Adagio FX includes a single button export directly into Excel for simple e-mailing of formatted statements. Financial statements sent to Excel preserve all their formatting, and entire "Statement sets" can be sent to a single Excel workbook with one mouse click.

Adagio FX includes a set of standard report specifications that are compatible with any chart of accounts that uses the standard account group classifications. You can inspect a comprehensive set of example statements for companies and not-for-profits at the web site www.GreatStatements.com.

Financial Reporter Strengths

• Data selection. In addition to providing full access to account and company data, the Financial Reporter allows account and department selection using wildcards. Departmental comparatives are available as a simple specification option, with user selection of departments and the option to include a consolidated column, or a column summing the selected departments. A simple drop-down selects the desired financial period, with all figures instantly updated. Departmentalization can be turned on or off from the toolbar, with a similar instantaneous updating of figures. Adagio FX can be deployed onto manager's workstations with restrictions that allow them to view only their department's financial statements.
• Print options. Adagio FX includes "hide when print" as a row and column attribute, to easily suppress statement notes and improve formatting. SmartSheets, unique to Adagio FX, allow statements to be printed in either expanded or collapsed form. A single menu choice, File | Departmental Print, lets a user print out a set of statements for any or all departments (classes). Toolbar buttons provide print time suppression of inactive accounts and zero cell contents. Statement Groups can be defined to automate month-end statement printing.
• Formatting and graphing. Adagio FX provides full control over cell, row and column formatting, including font selection and character attributes. Company logos can be inserted directly onto the financial statement, to provide that "finishing touch". Graphics and cell attributes are maintained when the financial statement is exported to Excel, should you wish to include a chart or graph.
• Ease of use. Adagio FX's user interface is intuitive, with many small conveniences available during statement design. Columns and rows may be selected and dragged into new positions on the statement. Account ranges can be printed directly on the statement if necessary. Since our last look at this product, Softrak has added the ability to import an Excel spreadsheet with all its formulas and formatting to ease the start-up curve. Additional formulas have been added to simplify the creation of SmartSheets with dynamic statement presentation. Autosum and "duplicate row" speed template production, making it possible to create a complicated statement from scratch in under an hour.

Financial Reporter Weaknesses

• Data must be retrieved prior to reporting. This represents an extra step at the end of every reporting period. However, it does allow individuals to analyze financial statement figures without requiring access to all of the accounting functions. Be warned that, because of the design of the QuickBooks SDK, retrieving the data from a large dataset can take a long time, especially if the detail transactions are being retrieved. Once the data is in Adagio FX, it can be saved there to minimize subsequent retrieval times.
• Cash-based statements may be a problem. Adagio FX is designed to report statements on an accrual basis. Some cash based statements do not report correctly. The developer is working on this issue.

Data You Can Include on Reports

Financial statements can include as many columns of data as you wish, and can contain any of the following account information:

• Current or historical balances for any range of accounts
• Net changes for a fiscal period, quarter, half-year or year
• Comparative figures from complete or to-date time spans
• Budget figures
• Department figures
• Account numbers and ranges

Because statements are created in a worksheet, you can use any formulas and functions to perform relative change calculations on General Ledger figures to express them as percentages or ratios.

You can also use any of the following information in a financial statement:

• Company information such as the name, address, phone number and company contact
• The start and end dates of a given fiscal period
• The options selected for printing the financial statement (such as the print date, the department range, or the period-end date)

This information is retrieved from your dataset, allowing you to create a single statement template that can be used for multiple companies.

Numbering the Chart of Accounts

Adagio FX relies on a numbered chart of accounts to decide which account balances should be displayed on the statement. Softrak recommends that account numbering be turned on in QuickBooks, but Adagio FX will also auto-number the chart of accounts as the information is retrieved.

Consolidating Accounts

With Adagio FX, consolidating a range of accounts is as simple as including all the necessary accounts in the formula. The financial reporter will automatically compute the required number for the range, whether it is a balance or net change over some period. With SmartSheet, ranges can be displayed in expanded or collapsed form by including the ".Range" command in column A of the statement.

Standard Financial Statements

Adagio FX comes with over 60 standard financial statements that you can customize or use as is:

• Balance Sheets presented for various organization types.
• 12 Month Income Statement, both rolling and static, by month and quarter
• Income Statement, with various presentation options.
• Trial Balance Worksheet
• Balance Sheet and Income Statement with Common Ratios (Acid test, Current Ratio etc.)
• Automatically adjusting Actual+Budget=Forecast P&L to track anticipated performance against budget.
• Balance Sheet with automatic movement of bank account into Asset or Liability section depending on account balance.

Visit www.GreatStatements.com to see a selection of example statements shipped with every copy of Adagio FX. These sample statements can be used with any chart of accounts, simply by dragging and dropping the appropriate account range onto the statement. Until November 30, 2006, you may download a free, full-function copy of Adagio FX Standard Edition, licensed for single company use, by visiting www.greatstatements.com/sleeter.

Sample Income Statement with Logo and Formatting