Guides/Financial statements/Income statement and balance sheet

Income statement and balance sheet

Under Finance → Statements you get a monthly income statement and balance sheet built from your ledger — presented the way you'd publish them, not the way the raw ledger stores them.

What you should know when reading them:

  • Signs are presentation-correct. Revenue shows positive, expenses show positive, and the arithmetic between them is right — the accounting signs are handled underneath (see How to read the numbers).
  • Lines are aggregated the way your chart intends. Accounts that belong to the same statement line are summed into one line — you drill into a line to see the accounts behind it.
  • The statement knows whether it ties. Each statement is reconciled against the ledger it came from; where a line carries an unreconciled difference, the statement shows it rather than absorbing it. A statement that ties says so — that's your assurance it's the same truth as your ledger, not a re-typed version of it.
  • Scale is your choice. Full rands, thousands (R'000) or millions (R'm) — set under Admin → Regional.

If a line looks wrong, drill first: nine times out of ten the surprise is a real entry in an account you didn't expect, and the drill shows you exactly which one.