Reporting and budgets

Reports that cannot disagree with the register

Every report runs against the derived ledger. The financial statements read the same source. So a report and the transactions behind it are the same data. Any figure opens down to the entries that made it.

That is not a given. Many systems build reports from separate summary tables, refreshed on a schedule. Which is why "the report says one thing and the register says another" is a call those vendors are used to taking.

The library

Grouped by what you want to find out. Not by which module made it.

Financial — balance sheet, profit and loss, income statement, cash flow, trial balance, general ledger detail.

Receivables — A/R aging, customer statements, sales by customer.

Payables — A/P aging, check register, vendor activity.

Banking — reconciliation status, outstanding items, account summary, daily cash.

All of them run for any period, against any comparison period.

Reporting by enterprise

These are the reports that make this different from a generic ledger.

You get a profit and loss per enterprise. Under it, per-unit figures — dollars per acre, per head, per truck, per job. Each enterprise knows its own unit and count.

Direct costs come from the lines coded to it. Shared costs arrive through overhead distribution.

You can compare enterprises against each other. You can also compare one against itself in an earlier year. That second one is usually where the value is.

An enterprise that made money three years running and is now flat tells you something. A single year's number does not.

Budgets

Set a budget by account, by period, and by enterprise. Then read actuals against it.

Variance shows in both dollars and percent. You need both.

A 3% overrun on your largest cost line is a bigger problem than a 40% overrun on something you spend $900 a year on. A report showing only percent puts those in the wrong order.

Budgets carry the enterprise too. So you can budget the parts separately. That is the only way it works when one part is seasonal and another is not.

The dashboard

A summary of where you stand. What you are owed and how old it is. What you owe. Your cash position. How the period is going.

It reads the same derived ledger as everything else. So the headline figure on the dashboard is the figure the balance sheet will show.

A dashboard that disagrees with the statements is worse than no dashboard. People act on the number they see most often.

Getting figures out

Reports print, export to PDF, Excel or CSV, and email. A lender or a landlord asking for a statement gets it without anybody saving a file and attaching it by hand.

Invoices and statements email straight to the customer they belong to.

A report can also go to your accountant through the portal, which skips email entirely.