Overview
Accounting Seed provides the following list of standard pre-configured Financial Reports. Each report can be filtered to run on any Ledger, Accounting Periods and GL Variables. They are:
- Profit & Loss
- Profit & Loss Versus Budget
- Balance Sheet
- Trial Balance
- Cash Flow Statement
- Ledger Inquiry.
Run a Financial Report
- Navigate to the Accounting Home.
- From the Reporting Section, click Financial Reports.
- Select the report you would like to run.
- Select the Accounting Period(s), Ledger, and GL Variables you would like to filter on.
- Click the Run button. The values chosen will be stamped in the resulting report footer.
- Once the report has finished generating, click the Report Number link in the Report Generation Jobs section of the screen.
- In each of the Financial Reports, any values that are underlined can be clicked into to reveal a list of the underlying data that makes up that value. For further information about how this applies specifically to inception-to-date accounts (i.e. Balance Sheet), see notes below.
- If a GL Account has more than 4000 transactions for a particular accounting period:
- Drilling into its hyperlink on a Financial Report will display the first 4000 transactions.
- A message will display informing the user that only the first 4000 records are displayed.
- The native Salesforce report Transaction Detail by GL Account can be run to retrieve a complete list of transactions.
- If a GL Account has more than 4000 transactions for a particular accounting period:
When opening or closing multiple Accounting Periods at the same time, you may notice a delay in running reports until the opening or closing process has been completed. Opening and closing accounting periods typically takes three minutes to process. See Close and Open Accounting Periods.
Standard Financial Report Details
Profit & Loss:
- Shows the current period activity for the actual ledger.
- No Accounting Periods need to be closed to run this report.
- Can be run for up to 12 Accounting Periods at one time.
Profit & Loss Versus Budget:
- If Show All Periods is selected, a user can show the monthly actuals vs the total budget for the periods selected.
- Shows the $ difference and the % difference between Total Actuals versus Total Budget over the same periods.
- No Accounting Periods need to be closed to run this report.
Balance Sheet:
- Columns show inception-to-date activity for Balance Sheet GL Accounts.
- Although a Balance Sheet represents inception-to-date balances, drilling down into values on the Balance Sheet will only provide that selected period’s activity. To run a multi-period activity for a Balance Sheet account, Accounting Seed recommends using the Salesforce reporter which can be navigated to through Accounting Home > Financial Reports > Management Reports.
- Can be run for up to 12 Accounting Periods at one time.
- Can be run for all closed periods plus the open period immediately following the last closed period.
Note: If the last period the report is run for is not yet closed, the Current Year Earnings GL Account will not be updated. This will cause the report to be off by only the current year earnings amount for that open period. All other lines will be accurate.
Trial Balance:
- Shows the Opening Balance, Current Period Activity, and Year-To-Date balance for all GL Accounts for the period it is run for.
- Can be run for closed periods or the open period immediately following the last closed period.
- Can be run for one period at a time.
Cash Flow Statement:
- Shows the breakdown of transactions by Cash Flow Category for all cash and cash equivalent GL Accounts.
- Shows the beginning cash balance, current period, and year-to-date values for each category.
- Can be run for closed periods or the first open period immediately following the last closed period.
- Can be run for an individual period, or for all periods within a particular fiscal year, provided they are closed or the first open period.
- When you are ready to activate Accounting Seed's Cash Flow Statement feature, you will need to wait until the beginning of your next fiscal year. because cash related transactions are required to be tagged with a Cash Flow category in order to generate a Cash Flow Statement. Cash related transactions include:: Cash Disbursements, Cash Receipts and Journal Entries to a cash account. For set up details for this report please refer to the Cash Flow Categories Set Up article.
Ledger Inquiry:
- Shows a user a GL Account’s transaction history that was posted to the general ledger. In order to run this report the following must be defined:
- Accounting Period range (no more than 12 periods)
- Ledger
- A user can also refine their results by additional filters:
- Project (Revenue and Expense GL accounts only)
- Project Task (Revenue and Expense GL accounts only)
- Account
- GL Variables 1-4
- If a user has a need to run a ledger inquiry for multiple GL accounts concurrently or for more than 12 accounting periods, then Accounting Seed recommends using the Salesforce reporter’s Transaction Detail by GL Account report which can be navigated to through Accounting Home > Financial Reports > Management Reports.
- The number of records supported for the ledger inquiry report is 5000.
- It is now possible to run the Ledger Inquiry report for the Profit & Loss GL Accounts with Open Start and End Accounting Periods.
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Comments
13 comments
When I try to run the standard "Profit and Loss Versus Budget" report noted above, when I click on the "Run" button, the system blanks out the ledger field and gives me an error message that says "Error - Attempt to de-reference a null object". What does this mean? What needs to be done to fix it?
Hi Jaennae,
We need you to submit a support ticket to resolve this.
Thanks,
Tony
Is there a way to exlude inactive GL accounts from the financial reports?
Hi Sara,
The best way to do this is to create a custom report and selecting only your active GL accounts. Here is a helpful article to walk you through this process. There is also a related ASU course at the bottom of this article:
https://support.accountingseed.com/hc/en-us/articles/217569927-Custom-Financial-Reports-Overview
Thank you,
Ryan
I have a couple questions re: the Cash Flow report:
is there any mechanism in place (Like a "Cash" checkbox on the GL Account) to specify which GL Accounts are to be considered "Cash or Like Cash" accounts to help with validation rules to make sure the Cash Flow category fields are populated in the correct instances ... Particularly Journal Entries. Or does the system use anything flagged as a "bank" account?
If the system uses GL Accounts flagged as bank accounts - what are the implications for people who have flagged an account as a bank account in order to be able to reconcile it or use it as the credit side of a cash disbursemet, for example. i.e. what happens if you populate a cash flow category on a non-cash transcation?
Thanks!!
Hi Rebecca,
Correct, any GL account that has the Bank checkbox checked will flow through to the cash flow report.
Typically, the credit side of a cash disbursement will be a bank account that has the bank checkbox checked and this will flow to the cash flow report.
If a cash flow category is selected for a GL account that is not marked with the bank checkbox, then this will not flow to the cash flow report.
Thank you,
Ryan
Thanks Ryan, that helps clarify.
Does the package have validation rules in place (when cash flow tracking is enabled) to ensure that cash flow categories are assigned when a bank account is specified? Or is it up to the end user to put those in place?
Yes, once the cash flow is enabled in accounting settings, it is a required field on a cash receipt, cash disbursement, and journal entry line for a GL account that has the bank checkbox checked.
Thank you,
Ryan
When you drill down into the underlying transactions from a Financial Report, can we change what fields appear from the transaction?
Hi Sophie,
Currently, these cannot be changed, but we are looking into allowing that. What fields are you looking to add? You should be able to create an underlying report by clicking into the "reports" tab. Here, you will be able to add, group, and filter by fields of your choice.
Thank you,
Ryan
I agree with Sophie. Being able to change the fields to see the "Reference" &/or "Notes" field (our description field on A/P &/or GL Entries, for example) and other fields would be helpful. I do understand custom reports can be created, but that requires several additional steps to obtain the same info we need to do quick reviews of GL accounts for proper posting when trying to close out month-end. If we could change the fields on the drill-down to see this info, it would save us accountants a lot of time (and Time is Money)!!! Also, once in the drill-down, if we could change the dates to see the whole year, that would be great too. These two functions are available in QuickBooks and make things much quicker and easier when reviewing reports.
We have a custom field on Transaction that gives some of the same info as "Notes" but also brings in the Payable Line comment (not just the invoice). And removing some of the ones we don't need.
Do you mean creating a normal Salesforce report to show it? Yeah, we can already do that. We wanted the Transactions from the Financial Report screen though.
Hi Sophie and Jeanae,
Thank you for your feedback and I agree, allowing some customization in the drill down would be very beneficial. I have added this internally to our product enhancement list, but I do not yet have a timeline on when this may happen. Once that becomes available, I will have our customer success rep follow up with the both of you.
Thank you,
Ryan
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