Top Four Things Beginners Should Know About FRx

I recently ran up to Dallas to give the FRx presentations at GPUG’s BIFocus event.

Today I’m going to share a very small portion of my “FRx for Beginners” presentation—the top four things that newcomers should know about FRx. Following that, I’m going to depart from business-only content and share some fun facts about Cowboys Stadium.

Without further ado, here are the top four things that beginners should understand about FRx:

1. Mix & Match: the building blocks (rows, columns, trees) are reusable. So for example you can have one primary P&L row format, and use it with four different column layouts (I showed current and ytd, trend, budget variance, and forecast) to create four different reports. Lots of flexibility.
2. Accuracy: it’s critically important to build accuracy checks into each report. Use a check total at the bottom of most, if not all, reports. And when you add a tree to a report, make sure the report is accurate first, then add the tree. And it better tie back to the original report—or something’s wrong with the tree.
3. Drilldown: this is one of the coolest features of FRx, and it’s important to know that it’s not enabled by default. In the catalog, set the detail level to Financial & Account on most reports. And please, I’m begging you…avoid NP nonprinting rows if at all possible. They just screw up drilldown capabilities and many are completely unnecessary.
4. Natural account in the row, Subaccount in the tree: this is the easiest fastest best most flexible most efficient way to set up FRx. The natural account goes in the row format, and the tree does the heavy lifting with the rest of the account structure. There are many designs that go beyond this, but this is a great rule of thumb.

OK enough FRx for today. Let’s have a little fun. It’s 5 o’clock somewhere, right?

Driving up to Dallas for this presentation, I couldn’t resist swinging by Cowboys Stadium to take a tour. I know I’ll lose some business for this [grin] but I’ve been a Cowboys fan since I was a little girl watching football with my dad. I remember crying when they lost. (Things haven’t changed a whole lot.)

Anyway, if it helps any, the Cowboys are harder to love these days. For what it’s worth, here are my other favorites: Saints, Packers, Colts, Giants (can you believe it), 49ers, Bills, Broncos, Cardinals. Needless to say, I can’t wait for Saints/Packers one week from today.

Enough already…here are the fun facts from my stadium tour. I was the only one taking notes :)

• There had been some soccer game there earlier, and the field wasn’t back down yet, so I didn’t get to run any routes. I did see gigantic bundles of rolled up turf.
• The giant TV that is the focal point (other than the field) cost $40 million. By contrast, Texas Stadium in Irving only cost $35 million total. (I do know about the time value of money, though.)
• There are 3,200 TVs.
• When you go to the snack bar, TVs line the area, showing the live game on one and the menu on the one next to it.
• There is a separate IP address for each TV. (So if you walk up in an Eagles jersey, the attendant can press a button and make the price of beer go up by $15.)
• There are 1,600 toilets, and 60 percent of them are reserved for women.
• The bathrooms are interchangeable, so during a recent Jonas Brothers concert, they made 80 percent available to women.
• I saw photographs of the first ever Hail Mary. It was December 28, 1975. Cowboys vs Vikings in a championship game. According to Wikipedia: “From midfield, with 24 seconds now remaining, Staubach lined up in the shotgun formation, took the snap, pump-faked left, then turned to his right and threw a desperation pass to wide receiver Drew Pearson” at the 5, defender fell down and Pearson backed into the end zone for the TD. Staubach told reporters “I closed my eyes and said a Hail Mary”. There was a photograph of Pearson in the end zone with shocked and stunned Vikings fans looking on in disbelief. But one extremely happy Cowboys fan had a big grin and his arms up in the classic touchdown position. Then there was an orange that was thrown by a spectator that was mistaken for a penalty flag, and I saw a photo of that too. I just bet I watched this game on TV in 1975. I do remember lots of Staubach-engineered come-from-behind victories.
• The Cotton Bowl has their offices in the building, and I saw some Cotton Bowl memorabilia. One funny story has Alabama playing Rice in the 1954 Cotton Bowl. Rice was beating Alabama, and a Rice running back took off down the field on what looked to be yet another touchdown run. The Alabama coach yelled something like “Would somebody PLEASE tackle that guy!”…so a guy came off the Alabama bench and tackled him. You can see the play on YouTube. After that, the ‘too many men on the field’ rule was implemented.
• Back to Cowboys Stadium: they have a jail! Actually there are two jails. Each holds 40 people. Come to think of it, I would love to get thrown in jail in Cowboys Stadium. Maybe someday.
• The retractable roof is 2.5 acres, same as Texas Stadium.
• There is a Cowboys Star on top of the TV so that you know it’s Cowboys Stadium when you’re flying over.
• There are 93 air conditioning compressors.
• There are 2 miles of air conditioning vents, and they are 8 feet in diameter in places.
• We toured the locker room!
• It really didn’t smell like a locker room though, because 4000 pounds of equipment are shipped from Valley Ranch for each game.
• 6,200 people are employed on gameday.
• Saw the data center!
• 76 corporations run through the data center.
• There are 500 servers and 250 blades.
• There are 261 miles of fiberoptic.
• 5 million feet of copper wire.