If you have a very detailed chart of accounts, you may want to be able to produce summarized financial statements. There are a few options to accomplish this but the easiest method is to use the roll-up feature. In order to use the roll-up, your account numbers need to be formatted properly and the accounts to be summarized need to be adjacent, with no other accounts in between. But if your situation meets the requirements it will save a lot of manual work in the financial statement designer.
The roll-up works by combining accounts with partially matching account numbers. The matching portion has to be at the beginning of the account number, but you get to decide how many characters need to match in order for the accounts to be included in the roll-up.
For an example let’s look at the sample company, Bellwether Garden Supply. Their account numbers consist of a 5 digit main account number, a dash, and then a two character department code. They have 15 departments so they could benefit from a summarized income statement.
To customize a financial statement, open the financial statement designer by going to the Reports & Forms menu, choose Financial Statements, select a statement from the list to use as your starting point, and click the Design button. For this example select the report named <Standard> Income Statement.
In the design window you’ll see a column of grey buttons near the left side of the window. Each of these represents a row or group of rows on the report. The ones labeled Line Description control which accounts appear in each section.
We’re going to roll up all 15 departmental sales accounts into one line, so right-click on the Line Description under Revenues and choose Properties. A window will open. In the Formatting section there is a drop down list labeled Print. Change that setting to Rollup. For some reason the drop-down list only shows 2 lines at a time, but don’t let that confuse you, there are more options. You can scroll through the list but the easiest method is to just type a letter “R” after clicking in the list.
After setting the Print option to Rollup, the Rollup Mask field will become available below it. Here is where you can tell Sage 50 how many characters of the account number need to match for the accounts to be rolled up. The * (asterisk) is used as a wildcard character. Since we want to roll up accounts in which everything matches except the department, enter 12345-** as the rollup mask. Click OK, then Preview the report. Now you will see that there is only one Sales line and the amount is the total of all of the 40000-_ _ accounts, and all of the other income accounts still show in detail. The description for the summarized row is taken from the first account that is included in the rolled up range. In this case it is account 40000-00. If you are going to use account rollup, you may need to add accounts such as this to get the descriptions to appear the way you want. Mark the accounts as inactive if you want to make sure that transactions don’t get posted to those heading accounts.
Let’s take a closer look at the rollup mask. Other than the wildcards, which have to be *, you can enter just about any character as the first part of the mask. In this case we want the accounts that start with 40000 to be rolled up. So logically you might enter 40000-**. But that would actually roll up any five character groups that are within this line description, such as 41000-** or 42000-**, into their own respective lines too, just like 12345-** does. Since it is the number of characters that matters, I usually put in 123 (etc.) so that I can easily see if I’ve entered the right number of digits.
Also, because I have included the dash before the department wildcards, this actually tells Sage 50 to roll up when the first 6 characters match. If you have some accounts (such as heading accounts) that don’t have a dash or department number, you could change it to 12345***. Then accounts that are only 5 characters long will get included in the rollup as well.
Let’s look at one more example. We’ll set the cost of sales section to roll up any time the first 3 character of the account number match. Double-click on the Line Description that is below Cost of Sales. Set the Print option to Rollup and enter 123***** as the rollup mask. Click OK and preview the report. Now the cost of sales section will be rolled up into four lines: Product Cost, Direct Labor, Material Cost, and Subcontractors.
When you are done customizing the report, click the Save button and give it a new name. Then your summarized income statement will always be available along with the other reports.
