Abstract: The present invention relates to a uniform financial reporting system interface, between a financial reporting tool and a general ledger database, which is capable of receiving a generalized request (non-database-specific request) from a report object or engine of a financial reporting tool. Based upon information included in the generalized request, the uniform interface accesses data from the general ledger database and returns the accessed data to the report object. The data is accessed from the general ledger database and returned to the report object by the uniform interface with the help of at least one staging table that has a standardized structure that is independent of a structure of the general ledger database.