Only about twenty people use the cms “Denver” report AD043 – Summary of Balance Sheet Accts. So I would like to try out some possible alternatives before proceeding. If you use AD043, please explore these alternatives and reply on this blog post to let me know if any are sufficient.

AD043 is cross-tabulation, summing actuals by account codes (down) by fund groups (across).

Alternative #1 – m-Fin BALANCE SHEET TOTAL

m-Fin BALANCE SHEET TOTAL offers nearly identical information. Instead of fund groups it uses individual fund codes, and instead of in columns, each fund is on a separate page. m-Fin BALANCE SHEET TOTAL is in Cognos Production. So this is the least amount of work for my office – it is already done.

Alternative #2 – m-Fin ACCOUNT RANGE BY FUND and m-Fin ACCOUNT BY FUND

m-Fin ACCOUNT RANGE BY FUND and ACCOUNT BY FUND are limited to five columns but any fund or combination of funds can be assigned to each column. You can run m-Fin ACCOUNT BY FUND by itself or drill to it from m-Fin ACCOUNT RANGE BY FUND. These reports were not developed specifically for balance sheet accounts but we could add an optional prompt to m-Fin ACCOUNT RANGE BY FUND to narrow the focus to just this range of accounts. These reports are in production but I went ahead and made one small adjustment to m-Fin ACCOUNT BY FUND to make it better for this purpose, so please try these reports in Cognos QA.

Alternative #3 – m-Fin BALANCE SHEET ACCOUNTS BY FUND

If Alternatives #1 and #2 are not sufficient we could offer a new report named m-Fin BALANCE SHEET ACCOUNTS BY FUND, now available for you to try in Cognos QA. In this report I choose to leverage a canned Cognos technique to make fund code columns. We don’t have to advance this report to production. We can discard it if the other alternatives are better. If you need fund groups rather than individual fund codes, we could enhance this report to do it. Most of the effort would be getting the drills to work.