Financial reporting
The Financial Reporting module produces your financial statements straight from the general ledger: a profit and loss, a balance sheet and a cash flow statement, for any dates, compared with an earlier period, and ready to download as PDF or Excel.
Before you begin
- Financial Reporting needs the Accounting module. Statements use posted entries only; drafts are ignored.
- Amounts are in your organization's currency. The balance sheet uses the Fiscal year starts in setting from organization settings to work out the year's earnings.
- Open the module from Financial statements in the main menu (
/m/financial-reports), or search the command palette for Open financial statements.
The page has four tabs: Profit and loss, Balance sheet, Cash flow and Cash flow classes.
Choose the period and comparison
Each statement tab has the same controls:
| Control | Options |
|---|---|
| Period | This month, This quarter, This year (the default; the calendar year), Last year or Custom dates. |
| From and To | The dates of the period. Changing them switches the period to Custom dates. |
| Compare with | Previous period (the default), Same period last year or Nothing. |
Previous period is the period just before yours and of the same length. A period of whole months is compared with the same number of whole months: a quarter with the previous quarter, a year with the previous year. Same period last year uses the same dates one year earlier.
When the comparison is on, the statement shows a second column for the earlier period.
Profit and loss
The Profit and loss tab shows, for the period:
- Income: each income account, then Total income;
- Expenses: each expense account, then Total expenses;
- Net profit: total income less total expenses.
Accounts appear as in your chart of accounts: header accounts show the total of the accounts under them, and accounts with no amount in any column are left out.
Balance sheet
The Balance sheet tab shows balances at the end of the period (At the To date), and at the end of the comparison period:
- Assets, then Total assets;
- Liabilities, then Total liabilities;
- Equity: your equity accounts, plus Earnings of the fiscal year (profit since the start of the fiscal year) and Earlier earnings not closed (profit of earlier years not yet moved to an equity account), then Total equity;
- Total liabilities and equity.
Total assets must equal total liabilities and equity. If they do not, the page says This statement does not balance: check the ledger.
Cash flow statement
The Cash flow tab explains how your cash changed over the period, using the indirect method:
- Operating activities start from the net profit, then add the change of each operating account (receivables, payables, inventory, tax accounts and so on), ending with Net cash from operating activities.
- Investing activities show the change of investing accounts, such as equipment, ending with Net cash from investing activities.
- Financing activities show the change of financing accounts, such as loans and owner's capital, ending with Net cash from financing activities.
- Net change in cash is the sum of the three, followed by Cash at the beginning and Cash at the end.
The net change must equal the change in your cash accounts; if it does not, the page warns that the statement does not balance.
Cash flow classes
The Cash flow classes tab lists every balance sheet account that takes entries, with the class it counts in: Cash, Operating, Investing or Financing. Cash accounts are those whose change the statement explains.
Unless you choose otherwise, accounts are classed like this:
| Accounts | Default class |
|---|---|
| Accounts used for Cash or Bank, and the ledger accounts of bank accounts | Cash |
| Asset accounts with codes 1500–1999 (fixed assets) | Investing |
| Other asset accounts | Operating |
| Liability accounts with codes 2700–2999 (long-term liabilities) | Financing |
| Other liability accounts | Operating |
| Equity accounts | Financing |
| The Retained earnings account | Operating |
To change an account's class, choose another one in its Class list. The change is saved at once and applies to every cash flow statement. Choose Default (…) to go back to the default class.
If your chart numbers fixed assets or long-term loans differently from the starting chart, review this tab once so that the cash flow statement puts them in the right section.
Download a statement
On any statement tab, select:
- PDF for a printable file, or
- Excel for a workbook you can work with further.
The file contains the statement as shown, with the same period and comparison, in your language.
Permissions
| Permission | What it allows | Granted by default to |
|---|---|---|
financial-reports.read | View and download financial statements | Administrators |
financial-reports.manage | Choose how accounts count in the cash flow statement | Administrators |
Tips
- If a statement shows Nothing posted in these periods., check the dates, and check that the documents for the period are posted (for example, approved bills, issued invoices, approved expense claims).
- Figures only include posted entries, so receivables documents waiting on the Postings tab are not in the statements until they are posted.
- Close your fiscal periods before producing year-end statements, so the figures cannot change afterwards.