I've never used an ERP before without P&L reports out of the box that, 1) compare subtotals to revenue, 2) can run a period vs budget, 3) can show MTD, YTD and Budget to date for both in the same report, 4) can show month over month in one report ... and nothing that shows a variance from comparatives.
Guest
| Company | Comfortrol, Inc. |
| Job Title / Role | Controller |
| I need it... | Yesterday...Come on already |
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I know I won't change your mind here...but just so you and everyone else know the back story.
At the beginning of Spectrum, they built their new system on top of an existing one called PRO-IV Accounting (hence why you type PA from the Command Prompt...PA stands for PRO-IV Accounting). This system came with a financial report tool that we still use today. Back in the early days of accounting software (i.e. Unix and DOS), it was common to have to create your financial statements manually.
Over the years, technology marched on and other systems automatically created the financials out of the box. We made the business decision to invest our R&D resources into adding other functionality that was required by our industry over updating the way our financials were created. Here, the thought process was that setting financial reports up was a one-time event for most clients so we could not justify changing the process when there was a ton of other stuff to do. Or said the accounting way, modernizing the financial statement report writer did not meet the cost-benefit rule.
Again, I am sure that I am not changing your mind here...but I wanted to share the history of how things evolved.
Geoff
Every other ERP system has the ability to provide out of the box financial reports. Unfortunately, the flexibility Spectrum allows their users, means the users have no way of getting financial reports out. We just implemented Spectrum, and our reports look like garbage and are embarrassing to send to our banks and other places that require them. We will probably end up having to build our own financial statements external to the system simply because these ones are so awful. In addition, I have launched many software systems, and I have a background in Crystal report writing and SQL databases. Systems generally come fairly easy to me as a user. I have spent countless hours trying to correct these financial reports, and it's literally impossible. My assumption is, Spectrum simply wants to be able to make an extra buck off it's customers by requiring us to come to you for any corrections to the financial statements. It's pretty terrible and a huge time waste when this system is supposed to make our lives easier.
The challenge here is that we allow for up to a 12 digit G/L code. Add in a 10 character cost center plus your company code...and we have a 25 character chargeline.
With this amount of potential flexibility we can't simply create the financials to meet everyone's requirements. That is why we typically take care of this during the implementation.
Not saying this as an excuse, but just to let you know some background...
Geoff