Intacct Dimensional Financial Reports – Project Profitability

• July 24, 2023
• Kathy Jastrzebski

Financial statements are essential tools that provide valuable information about an organization’s overall operations, financial position, and cash flows. However, relying solely on financial statements may not always offer the level of detail required for making well-informed business decisions. This is where Intacct’s innovative use of dimensions comes into play, enabling a deeper classification and categorization of data and offering a more granular perspective. 

By leveraging dimensions, Intacct allows users to generate dimensional financial reports, which are still based on financial information such as revenue, expenses, accounts payable (AP); these reports go beyond the surface offering insightful analyses of specific areas of operations, empowering businesses to make data-driven decisions. Dimensional financial reports answer questions like:

• Has customer or contract revenue changed year over year? Or month to month? If so, for which customers?
• Are any products being dropped repeatedly?
• How much is spent by vendor month over month? Is it increasing significantly? Should we search for better pricing from a competing vendor?
• How does each project (or grant) compare to their budget?
• Which projects are most profitable? Least profitable?
• What was my gross profit margin on projects?

In this post we’ll design the below project profitability report to answer the last two questions: which projects are most and least profitable and what each project’s gross profit margin is. Let’s delve into the world of dimensional reporting and unlock the true potential of financial data!

Navigation:

Reports > + Financial Reports

Step 1: Report info

• Report name – the name of the report as it will appear in the menu. (Note: you can change the name of the report as it prints in the format tab.)
• Report structure – what will appear in the rows of the report. Either Accounts or Dimensions. In our example we’ll choose Dimensions. What’s the difference? The accounts option is typically used when account groups and accounts are displayed in rows – think Balance Sheet, Income Statement, Cash Flow. The dimensions option is used when displaying dimensions, like project, in rows and account groups on columns.
• Filter by account group on rows – sometimes showing account groups in columns leads to way to many columns and too wide of a report. So, Intacct provides the ability to show account groups underneath each dimension, a mini P&L if you will.

Step 2: Rows

This is where we’ll define what information we want in our report. We would like Projects to appear as rows, and revenue and expenses to appear on columns.

Clicking the select dimension structures button brings us to the below screen:

• Section and row type – type of dimension, which in our example is Project.
• Dimension structure – this is the dimensions we would like to include in our report (more on dimension groups vs. structures in this blog post!). For example, I have a group called Campaigns (all projects with a type = Campaign), Events (all projects with a type = Event), and Project_Sort (all projects with a type = Project and sorted numerically by ID). I chose to include the project group, All Projects, which will include all projects that are of the type “Project”.
• Detail level – here we can choose either to show all details, meaning all projects, or summary, hiding all projects and just showing a total for the group. We can also choose to expand by a second dimension at this stage. For example, we may want to see profitability by project expanded into locations underneath.

Step 3: Columns

Column 1: The first column is auto-generated with the names of the project. We can edit this column to add an ID if needed.

*Pause* Have you saved your report? Periodically click save to make sure you don’t lose any work.

Column 2: This column will have revenue for inception to date.

Column 3: Hover over Column 2 to add a column to the right for direct expenses/COGS inception to date.

Column 4: Next, we need to add a computation column to calculate gross profit (revenue – COGS).

Column Type: Summary on Columns

Summary: Sub(2,3) – subtracts columns 2 and 3.

Column Title: Gross Profit

Conditional Highlighting: We want to highlight any projects that were positive and any that were negative. (Conditional Highlighting > Edit Rules) (More on Visual Indicators here!)

Column 5: Just for fun, let’s also add Gross Profit Margin % as a column. Add another computation column, but this time divide Revenue into Gross Profit.

Step 4: Filters

Here we can set the report to filter by date and dimensions. We can allow users to select a date or dimension by selecting the “Prompt” checkbox.

Step 5: Format

This step allows you to choose how the report will be displayed (fonts, font sizes, headers, footers, etc). In this example, we’ve chosen to round by whole numbers.

Step 6: Notations

You can add notations next to specific account groups that will appear in their own column on the report.

Step 7: Permissions

Here we choose who we’d like to be able to view this report.

Step 8: Next steps

This is where you can inactivate the report, choose to add the report to your Dashboard, schedule it to run periodically, or set it as a Favorite.

 Now, we’re ready to preview the report:

Note: In dimensional reports, we can also add attributes (standard or custom fields) related to the dimension. In our example report, I’ve added begin date to give additional context.

What’s next?

Need help building reports or just general training? Reach out to your CLA Sage Intacct team!

Tags: Dimension, Dimension Financial Report, Project, Reporting, Reporting | No Comments »