Types of EZ13 reports

This is in some ways a continuation of the prior blog entry on how to create spreadsheet output.

EZ13 provides several types of reports. Let's look at what each provides. (I'll describe specifically the spreadsheet output type #1; the text report includes basically the same information, but laid out differently.)

1) Income Statement/Balance Sheet Detail: This is our most comprehensive report of calculated information (all of the accounts involved in lease accounting for a period). We've tried to break out every account so you can see exactly what's happening. Each balance sheet account, for instance, shows five different values: beginning balance, added (for new leases), activity, removed (for terminations), and ending balance. In all, this report shows some 74 columns of calculated data, plus as many as 43 columns of descriptive information (including account numbers if you define them).

And that's just the first tab. On the second tab, we show the future minimum rent information. If you get minimum rents broken out by year for the first 5 years, then all remaining as a lump sum (as FAS 13 requires), the second tab shows 42 columns of calculated data per lease.

2) Income Statement/Balance Sheet Compact: Maybe that's overkill for you. The compact report shows 16 columns of calculated data, giving the essential highlights (just the ending balance for each balance sheet account, for instance).

3) Journal Entries: You may prefer to see each transaction a lease generates in journal entry form (each rent payment is a debit to obligation, a debit to accrued interest, and a credit to cash; etc.). Each line shows the lease number, period start and end date, account name, account number (if defined), debit or credit, and a description of the transaction so you know which lines go together and what they're for.

4) Amortization Schedule - Capital & Operating: You can view the activity for the entire life of a lease, with a separate line entry for each rent payment. Note that this report can get very large if you have many long leases; if you have several hundred leases that run 20 years or more paid monthly, you could exceed the maximum number of rows (65536) in versions of Excel before Office 2007. If that happens, you'll need to select subgroups of leases to report on (or upgrade Excel; the 2007 version permits over 1 million rows).

5) Future Minimum Rents: This report is identical to the second tab of the Income Statement/Balance Sheet Detail report. It's provided in case you only need future rent information.

6) Depreciation Over Economic Life: If you have leases that have an ownership transfer or bargain purchase option, they are depreciated over their economic life, which in most cases is longer than the lease term. Regular EZ13 reports stop reporting on a lease when it expires. This report shows the depreciation after the lease's expiration, until the end of its economic life.

7) Classification Summary: Lists how each lease fits into the four tests for capitalization; if the lease is capital, its capital rate is shown.

8) Listing: As mentioned above, this report is not available in spreadsheet format except as an export of a text report. The reason is that there is really no way to show all the input information for a lease across a single row: There can be an indeterminate number of rent steps, for instance, which can easily overwhelm the maximum number of columns in Excel.

I hope this helps you get the results most useful to you. Most accountants and financial people live in Excel, and it's also a common method of importing and exporting data (such as loading results of EZ13 into a general ledger system). Knowing the best way to get the spreadsheet information you want can make EZ13 much more useful.