Infor F9 Hot-Links Your Excel to Your GL
Get Real-Time Financial Reports by Linking Your Spreadsheets to Your AccountMate GL
If you use Excel, then you already know how useful spreadsheets are for financial reporting. F9 provides a direct link from your General Ledger (GL) to Excel and gives you the most current information with a push of a button with no exports or manual entries required.
The decision to purchase F9 was a no-brainer
I used to spend hours each month preparing spreadsheets for our monthly financial reports. With F9, those hours have been reduced to minutes. Instead of manually transferring numbers from AccountMate reports into Excel spreadsheets, I simply open the spreadsheet, type in the current month, and watch the numbers populate. An additional advantage is that it eliminates data entry errors and the time spent attempting to find them. I’ve used F9 for the past two months and already wonder how I survived without it.
How F9 works
When you’re in Excel, you just hit the F9 key on your keyboard to refresh your spreadsheet with current general ledger data from AccountMate. It’s as easy as that!
Examples
- In your budget in Excel, change your period from May to June. Hit F9 and the June data comes in from AccountMate. Eliminate exporting or manual keying of data from AccountMate.
- If someone posts a batch of journal entries in AccountMate, hit F9 in Excel to update your balance sheet with the new data. Data instantly comes into Excel formatted correctly.
- In your income statement, change your data once, hit F9, and all the worksheets will update. No need to re-run your cash flow statement or anything else.
Watch Kevin’s 18-minute demo to see F9 in action
Gain real-time insight and discover trends in your business performance by using F9 Business Analysis. Anyone who uses spreadsheets has simple, yet powerful capabilities to gather and analyze business information. You can easily build or create custom reports, which allow you to accelerate decision-making with in-depth financial reporting. F9 also gives you the ability to create a single Microsoft Excel template for multiple report generations. Pre-built drag and drop Excel functions, reports and business intelligence provide commonly-accessed configurations to help you save time, money and start delivering results immediately.
Overview of F9 Features
What can F9 do? It offers an unbeatable feature package including flexible cell-based reporting, consolidations, drill down, budgeting, multiple date ranges, multi-currency, lists of account segments and report analysis. It does all of this while being dynamically hot linked to the GL, ensuring that all numbers are timely, consistent and complete.
1. Speed, Power and Ease of Use
The true value of F9 becomes apparent when you realize the scope of reporting functions that become available with this one simple GL function. When one GL function is entered once and then copied to other cells the report grows. New data columns are created by copying existing columns and editing the heading. A one month report becomes a 12-month report with one COPY command! No need to manually re-key numbers.
Everything you need to know about your spreadsheet can be applied to the reports you create using F9. Use Excel’s functionality to add graphs, buttons and backgrounds to your reporting systems. You already know how to use your spreadsheet – therefore, you already know how to use F9.
2. Report Wizard
The F9 Report Wizard allows you to go from a blank spreadsheet to a fully formatted, hot linked report in just seconds! Follow a graphical representation and step-by-step procedure; point and click your way to a finished report complete with F9’s formulas automatically. It is so powerful; it’s the only feature many people need to use.
3. Drill Down
No financial reporting application would be complete without drill down capabilities. F9’s Drill Down lets you analyze any balance by the various account code segments or by the GL transactions that created it. You can also make use of the drill down results in the body of the report for trend analysis or other purposes. Drill Down lets you explore the numbers in your reports to their origins.
4. Consolidation
F9 can consolidate GLs that do not share the same account structures or are from different companies in your AccountMate installlation – all with the push of a button.
5. Budget Write-Back
Budget Write-Back allows you to create or edit your budgets inside Excel and then write the budget information back into the GL for subsequent reporting. Create customized financial reports in Excel, quickly and accurately – with no re-keying.
6. Report Analysis
Analyze by various criteria such as multi-company or multi-department reports and see which accounts are missing or duplicated.
7. Mine Information
Take any slice of data to create a report or do analysis. F9’s hot link technology makes your most critical business data in GL instantly accessible, solving the biggest concerns accountants have about their financial systems.
8. Report on Any Data Range
Many businesses require reporting for other than fiscal periods. Manufacturing, distribution, non-profit organizations, etc. rely on evaluating information from many non-standard date ranges. With F9, you can create reports for any date range you want – a day, week, or weekend – whatever makes sense for your particular business.
9. Report Automation and Distribution
Create a full-featured production reporting interface for generating consistent reports on a monthly, weekly or even daily basis. Standard and customized reports can be scheduled and distributed to meet specific business requirements. F9 allows you to define and design your report quickly and easily through drop down menus and graphics.
New Features in Version 6
With a new floating license, F9 is no longer tied to a specific user or desktop, giving your company more flexibility—along with support for on premise, virtual and cloud use.
Reporting enhancements are plentiful, with a new Scheduling Hub to automatically run and distribute hundreds of reports; a Report Refresh to recalculate reports in a selected cell range, worksheet or workbook; a cool GLTRAN function to create reports by a specified date range bi-monthly or weekly; and more.
Plus nicer user interface elements such as new icons and drag and drop icons, and new Excel Slicers, and more. See the complete list of new features and video demos on Infor’s What’s New in F9 Version 6 page.
Special offer for NexLAN clients
F9 just might be the easiest AccountMate add-on to use. To make it easier:
- We’ll install a fully runnable 30-day F9 trial version on your system FREE
- We’ll connect it to your AccountMate General Ledger FREE
- We’ll show you how to use it via a GoToMeeting session FREE
Why not “F9-ize” your favorite spreadsheets right away so they hot-link to your GL?
F9 is a Necessory
Here at NexLAN we highlight a few extensions as “Necessories,” or Necessary Accessories for every AccountMate system – extensions that you can’t live without! They make every business easier to operate and more productive.
Every business needs to build financial spreadsheets in Excel without exporting/massaging the data.
F9 delivers huge value in this area, integrates seamlessly to AccountMate, and is fully serviced and supported by NexLAN.