Financial Activity Report: Multiple Accounts and Stories
You're generating a Financial Activity Report (FAR) for an engagement with multiple accounts and stories, and you want to know how the report handles them — whether it can include transactions for every account at once, how stories are incorporated, and whether a transaction can belong to more than one story without losing its place in the first.
The FAR is a PDF, not an Excel file
The Exports control labels it Financial Activity Report, PDF — verbatim — and the output is
genuinely a PDF with an internal hyperlinked table of contents, not an Excel workbook. If you've
been told it's an Excel file, that's outdated information. The report is designed for handoff to a
client or court, not for filtering or pivoting in a spreadsheet.
When you generate a FAR, the underlying data pull is unscoped by account — every bank-sourced
account in the engagement is always included, regardless of which accounts you later select in the
report builder's Accounts checkbox or section filter. The Accounts selection controls which
accounts the rendered document displays or breaks out, not which accounts' data is collected. This
means the data isn't missing when you narrow the display; it's just not shown in that particular
section of the finished PDF.
The FAR builder has two separate controls: an Accounts checkbox (which is one of several data
sets you can include, like Statement Summary, Transfers, Date Gaps, Files, and so on) and an Add
Stories toggle that, when enabled, opens a story picker. These are independent — you don't pick
"accounts and stories" as one combined thing. If you've been describing it that way, that's a common
phrasing, but the interface treats them as separate sections with separate on/off toggles.
Once Add Stories is enabled, you pick which stories to include, and the finished report renders
a Stories section with:
- The story's name and description
- A data table of that story's transactions (date, account, description, check number as text,
inflow/outflow amounts, source page number, plus totals) - Optionally, a chart image tied to a visualization category (if you've associated one with that
story)
The Stories section never includes check images — those are pulled into the report only through the
separate Evidence section, which is scoped by account, not by story.
The underlying data model supports a transaction being tagged into as many stories as you like, with
no constraint limiting it to one. Adding a transaction to a second story does not remove it from the
first — that's by design, not a bug. If you've experienced a transaction disappearing from one story
after adding it to another, the likely cause is the tagging dialog's own behavior: it pre-checks
whatever stories the selected transaction already belongs to, and on Save it treats every checkbox
you unchecked as an explicit removal. Unchecking the first story while checking the second genuinely
removes it from the first, because that's what the dialog was told to do.
No row, account, or time cap exists for the FAR. A 100+ account engagement can be exported in one
request; success depends on renderer performance, not a hard limit. If a large report fails, it's a
rendering issue (the external service that builds the PDF timing out or running out of resources),
not a design constraint saying you have to generate reports one account at a time.
Adding a custom logo to the FAR is staff-only — it's configured through an Admin Customer Profile
setting you don't have access to yourself. Contact your account manager if you need a logo added.