Well, on to Peachtree and accounting. Let's start with tax filing deadlines. The IRS has a nifty calendar they publish which shows small business deadlines. Here are the deadlines for November. Click here.

Drill Down on Financial Statements
One of the great features of Peachtree is the way you can click your mouse on any line of a financial statement and see additional related information. Suppose you are reviewing you monthly Income Statement on the screen and you notice that Rent Expense seems high this month. All you need to do is click on the Rent Expense line of the Income Statement and you'll have a display of all transactions that contributed to that figure.

The General Ledger is the report that displays all the transactions in Peachtree. If you've clicked on the Advertising Expense line in the Current Month column of the Income Statement, it will take you directly into a General Ledger report of all transactions that occurred in the current month that contribute to creating that month's total for Advertising Expense.

When reviewing the General Ledger transactions that contributed to the Advertising Expense, you might notice that one or more of the transactions does not look right. Perhaps it has a suspicious date, description, or amount. All you need to do is click on the transaction you are wondering about and you'll be taken to the input screen where that transaction was originally entered. From this screen, the transaction can be modified or deleted. Perhaps you want to change an amount, description, or date. Make the changes you want and then close the various screens that have come up and you'll be right back where you started at the Income Statement - only now it will be updated to reflect the changes you've made.

Peachtree referrs to clicking on a report preview screen to see the underlying transactions as "Drilling Down". This Drill Down feature works on the Balance Sheet the same way it does on the Income Statement. In fact, most reports in Peachtree allow you to drill down from the report into the source transaction screen. It's just that many people do not realize that they can also perform this Drill Down for further detail from any of the Income Statement or Balance Sheet preview screens.

Printing Crystal Reports With a Different Printer
When printing Crystal Reports from Peachtree, start by previewing the report. If it looks ok, use the Setup Icon to change the programmed printer for this one print job. To do this, you may need to deselect the check box in the upper left hand corner where it says: No Printer. Once this field is deselected, you'll have access to the fields you need to change the printer as desired.

Printing Crystal Reports For a Range of Values
If your Crystal report prints for a range of values, it is important to have these values entered each time the report is run. This is called "entering parameters". Suppose we have a report that prints for a range of Item Type values. The report will print from one value of Item Type to another value of Item Type, such as from Item Type = Sales to Item Type = Service. This means that all inventory items that have a Type of Sales, Service, and anything in between will be included in the report. This would be done as follows. In Peachtree go to Reports/Crystal Reports. Double click on the new report to display it on the screen. When you do this a window should come up called Enter Parameter Values. Something like the words Start_Type and End_Type will be displayed in the upper left of the Enter Parameter Values window. These are the parameters that are used to run the report. You'll need to assign values to these parameters before the report is displayed.

The first of the parameters, in this case, Start_Type will initially be highlighted. Note that there will be a blank field in the center of the window called Discrete Value. This is where you need to key in the desired value of Start_Type. Once you are satisfied with the value for Start_Type, click up above on the next parameter, in this case it is End_Type. Again the Discrete Value field in the center of the window will be blank. Don't let it stay blank. Instead key in the value you want for this 2nd parameter.

Note: if you want to print the report for as wide a range of values as possible, it is generally ok to leave the initial value of the range as blank " ". Then to get the full range of values, the 2nd parameter can be set to ZZZZZZ. While it's usually okay to leave the starting parameter blank, don't leave the 2nd parameter blank. This is because leaving the 2nd parameter blank would result in a empty report displaying no records.

Service Contract Specials:
- Capitol Data Phone Support: $69.00 for 3 incidents over 12 months.
- Capitol Data E-mail support: $36.00 for 3 incidents over 12 months.

Well, that's all for this time - thanks for reading and we hope you'll be with us again next month. Also, please be sure to contact us for custom Crystal reports, Crystal Reports training, or any of your other Peachtree needs.

Jim Vogt, Accountant and Consultant
Capitol Data, LLC
nhcd@metrocast.net
866-837-8867
www.JVogt.com