New Macros Allow for Easy Formatting of All Parent Accounts and Subtotals
Here at Qvinci, we are always looking for ways to improve our solutions and add capabilities that deliver higher levels of functionality to our users. In this month’s column, I’m going to focus on a recent addition that gives users the ability to call out parent accounts and subtotals in bulk.
The new macros allow for easy formatting of all parent accounts and subtotals. This means that users aren’t limited to just bulk styling these types of rows in a report but can easily create roll-up reports as well.
Let’s take a look at the macros that were introduced:
%%headers%%
The Headers macro is used to call out parent accounts in a section. A Headers macro only ever needs to be listed once in a section (e.g. Income vs COGS). The macro will search for all parent accounts that exist in that section and take on the styling that has been applied. For example, if all parent accounts in the Income section should be Calibri font size 14, bolded and italicized, then inserting the headers macro and applying those font styles will cause all parent accounts in the Income section to also appear the same way.
%%totals%%
The Totals macro is used to call out all subtotal accounts in a section. The Totals macro also only needs to be applied once in a section. All subtotal rows will then take on the styling that has been applied to the Totals macro. Additionally, since total rows write financial data into cells (unlike header rows), a user might want to select the entire row to apply the styling edits. This means any cells that contain financial data will automatically carry the same styling as the subtotal account name itself.
Putting the Combination Together
The screenshot below shows a template that incorporates the Headers, Accounts and Totals macros in each section. In order to make it easy to follow what the macros do, I’ve given my Headers a blue background and my Totals (subtotals) a green background. This template means that all my parent accounts will be bold and blue and all of my subtotal accounts will be bold, italicized and green, based upon my styling edits.
Now, here’s what the previewed product looks like:
So, we see that the Header accounts that write into my previewed product for the Income section are all bold and blue (Engine Service, Vehicle Sales and Ford Vehicle Sales). Likewise, my subtotals accounts are all bold, italicized and green (Total Engine Sales, Total Ford Vehicle Sales and Total Vehicle Sales).
We see that I don’t have to know which specific accounts are my Headers vs Subtotals. This comes in handy when I need a one-size-fits-all template to drive a monthly P&L report for my clients/locations who don’t necessarily all use the same chart of accounts. Instead, by using the Headers and Totals macros, I can have Qvinci search for and apply the necessary styling to all my clients/locations header accounts and subtotal accounts.
You’ll notice that in my template, I also used the %%accounts%% macro to drive the subaccounts in the chart of accounts. Your styling edits can be applied at the accounts level as well.
Page Breaks
Page breaks have been incorporated in the same manner as Headers and Totals. By using a %%break%% macro, users can place this into their template (e.g. on a Balance Sheet report between where the Assets end and where Liabilities begin). This %%break%% macro means that when a template is placed into a Package, and the Package is downloaded, the report will break into separate pages where the macro exists.
As we build custom reports for clients, we’re finding that the addition of these new macros make the report creation process very user friendly and offer time savings as well. We hope you find that these new capabilities offer the same to you. To learn more about using the headers, totals and page breaks macros, visit our Knowledge Base and search those terms.