What are Report Filters?
Filters are a special feature that are only available with a fully licensed Small Business Edition. They also will show in the trial version, but are not available in the Personal Version. Filters allow more detailed and better reporting.
What extra features do filters give you?
Filters allow you to dissect your database of transactions, and are more applicable to more complicated personal finances and to business situations.
In the Personal Edition, you can do Profit and Loss reports (and other reports), but you cannot separate individual accounts or jobs for the reports. Therefore, your Profit and Loss will include all transactions within your nominated date range, and not allow you to split groups of transactions.
You can only search for all transactions against a Job code, or other separate financial entity, but not prepare a Profit and Loss Report (or other reports) for such a separate financial entity.
Using Filters allows you to do reports for a wide range of accounts, jobs and combinations of the above as you desire. You also can use filters to do BAS reports for separate financial entities.
The only different filters available are those used to prepare a Balance Sheet. Because of the nature of the Balance Sheet report, you cannot filter by individual Job. You have to filter by all jobs or no jobs for your chosen accounts. You also cannot filter by Use Future Provisions.
How to use Filters and preset filters
Filters are available wherever you can see the [+] in white or [+] symbol in major reports. The [+] symbol indicates that a filter is in use, with the type of filter appearing, in red, in the status bar of the relevant window.
If the [+] is white, no filters are being used i.e. all transactions within the date range are being searched.
Activating the [+]or the[+] button opens a drop down menu, asking you to either Maintain Filters or Use No Filters.
If you choose Maintain Filters, you can choose to filter by both account or accounts and/or the job codes, which you have previously set up.
You can vary the filter you use each time, or more ideally, you can set-up some preset filters. You must save your settings as a preset, before it will be used.
If you have saved a preset filter, the name or names of your preset filter of filters, will appear each time you activate the [+] button.
The currently selected filter is denoted with a tick.
Maintaining these Filters.
By clicking on Maintain Filters, a further screen would open, as shown below.
Having made your selection, a further screen would open. This screen allows you to select and save presets, and save or modify options.
You select an existing preset to modify it. You then select the Account and Job options that you require.
Save : saves the current account and job details under the current preset name.
Save as: Creates a new preset (you will be asked for a name), using settings for the currently displayed preset.
i.e. it allows you to make a copy. You then change the accounts/job to whatever you want.
If you change, you must save for the changes to take effect.
Rename: allows you to rename a preset.
Delete: allows you to delete a preset.
How this works may be illustrated by some examples…
1. Property investor.
In our example, a property investor has all his property transactions in one bank account, but has other accounts in his Budgets GetReal database.
He has four Job codes, of which three refer to his three investment properties. He selects his bank account and his three property codes, (omitting work), to place into a saved preset, called Rental property account. This will be remembered as a favourite preset.
He is using the filter to give him a Profit and Loss report, which will be a combined report for all three rental properties.
Similarly, he can do a range of reports for each property or perhaps for two out of three of his properties.
2. Small Business Owner.
If a small business owner had both a business bank account, and a business credit card account present in his database, as well as personal accounts, he could select the two business accounts to form a preset called “Business”, for reporting purposes for his business.
If he had several separate jobs or groups of jobs in that business, he could prepare a variety of reports, including Budget reports using the desired filter, for each job or group.
