Refresh Reporting Pack

The Reporting Pack functionality allows you to create a template which includes a cover sheet, index page, commentary page and any number of reports. The Reporting Pack can be refreshed automatically using new criteria, for example the report dates, and each report in the workbook will be re-executed using the provided criteria. The process will ensure that the reports include any new accounts or other applicable dimension values that were added since the Reporting Pack was refreshed previously.

The Reporting Pack can include Standard Reports (e.g. Profit And Loss), Detailed Reports (e.g. Aging Reports or General Ledger detail) or dimension lists (e.g. list of Accounts or Classes including all their properties). All these will be re-executed ensuring that any new values are always included in the output.

Create Reporting Pack

In order to create a Reporting Pack, proceed as follows:

• Navigate to the Import/Build Report menu.
• Select Performance Center > Reporting Pack.
• Complete the required parameters and create the report.
• A standard Reporting Pack template is created  with the following worksheets:
  • Cover Page - this worksheet contains the parameters that can be modified to refresh the Reporting Pack. The process uses Excel named ranges to identify these parameters. Please note that this worksheet and named ranges cannot be deleted or the reporting pack will become invalid. You can hide or move the cells containing the named ranges if you prefer to create your own cover page.
  • Index - a list of the pages in the Reporting Pack with Excel links to enable navigation. See this Excel help page to create links - Work with links in Excel.
  • Commentary - A page where you can add notes and explanations related to the Reporting Pack contents.
  • Profit And Loss - A default Profit And Loss report.

This Reporting Pack workbook can be saved as a normal Excel file to be reused. It can also be extended as required.

Extend Reporting Pack

Extend and enhance your Reporting Pack as follows:

• You can customize the colors and formatting of the worksheets (Note this excludes the Refreshable Report Worksheets as these will be recreated. You can still use the custom Excel styles that Flash creates to apply your preferred formatting to these reports).
• Add additional content to the Cover Page, Index and Commentary worksheets.
• Delete worksheets that are no longer required.
• Add additional reports to the Reporting Pack. Please note that only "Standard Reports" are supported at this stage. This is done as follows:
  • Follow the normal process to Import/Build a new report. Navigate to the menu and select Standard Reports > Profit And Loss. Select the other criteria as you normally would and complete the process to import the report.
  • A new worksheet is added to the workbook containing the new report. You can move this worksheet as required and name it appropriately.
  • Optionally add an entry to the Index worksheet with a hyperlink to navigate to the new report.
  • Repeat this process adding any other Profit And Loss, Balance Sheet, Cash Flow, Trial Balance, Aging or General Ledger reports.
• The Reporting Pack process also supports adding a worksheet that contains a list of dimension values for the QuickBooks company (See these instructions to import a list of values using the Flash functionality). For example you could include a list of customers, classes or departments. These lists will be re-executed when the Reporting Pack is refreshed ensuring that they contain any new values that have been added in the interim. You can then build other reports using these lists in such a way that they will grow dynamically if new values are added. Please note you can only have one list of dimension values on a worksheet.
• You can also add any other worksheets with your own custom schedules, calculations, charts etc. These worksheets will not be re-executed when the Reporting Pack Refresh process runs, but they will be recalculated. It is also possible to copy or move worksheets from other Excel workbooks into the Reporting Pack workbook and simply link the input parameters to the cells on the cover page worksheet.
• Refer to this article for clarity on which reports can be re-executed by the Refresh Reporting Pack process.

Refresh Reporting Pack

When you are ready to refresh the Reporting Pack proceed as follows:

• Open the Reporting Pack workbook.
• Navigate to the Cover Page. Update all the input parameters as required.
• Navigate to the Import/Build Report menu and select Refresh Reporting Pack.
• Review the information to ensure that all the parameters are correct and that the process has correctly identified all the worksheets that can be re-executed.
• Optionally click the "x" on any worksheets that should not be re-executed. Please note that this will permanently disable this worksheet from being re-executed by the refresh process.
• Do not make any changes to the Reporting Pack worksheets at this point. If you need to remove any worksheets from the workbook or rename a worksheet, first return to the main Import/Build Report menu and start the process again to read and validate the worksheets.
• Click the "Process" button and wait for the procedure to complete.
• All the identified reports and dimension lists will have been re-executed. Where applicable the input values on the re-created reports will be linked back to the named ranges on the cover page worksheet. For example, if you include a Profit And Loss report, the start and end date cells will be linked back to these parameter named range cells on the cover page worksheet.