Lesson 52-- Financial Reports

The Goldenseal business management software includes a variety of reports that show you valuable information about your business. Reports are a useful management tool.

Lesson 20 explains how to use the basic Reports window showing a wide range of estimating and basic business reports. This lesson covers some additional reports used for accounting and finances.

Balance Sheet

The balance sheet shows you a compact listing of your assets, liabilities and net worth. It's a good way to see how solvent your business is.

To see a balance sheet report, choose Financials from the Reports menu, then choose Balance Sheet from the submenu.

Click the Update button to have Goldenseal fill in the most recent values.

Income Statement

The income statement shows you a compact listing of your income and expenses. It's a good way to see how profitable your business is.

To see an income statement, choose Financials from the Reports menu, then choose Income Statement from the submenu.

The Income Statement gets all income values within the date range that is specified in the Date Range field. To see income and expenses for a different period, change the Date Range popup field (see Lesson 20).

The Cash figures are based on bank transactions, and the Accrued transactions are based on expense transactions and income transactions (sales, project billing and rental transactions).

Material Purchases Report

To see a list of material purchases, follow these steps:

  1. Choose Expenses from the Reports menu, then choose Material Purchases from the submenu.
  2. Click the Update button.
  3. You'll see the standard report, which is a simple list of all material purchases.
  4. Use the scroll control to view all of the items in the report.
  5. To see more detail about a purchase, double-click on its row. Goldenseal will open a regular browser window for the purchase that is listed in that row. It shows you everything about the purchase. If the transaction has not been closed, you can make changes to it.

HINT: Sometimes a report is the fastest way to locate a specific transaction.

You can use the Date Range field and the Item Range field to limit the purchases that you see in the report. You can also use breakdowns to group purchases by supplier, job, status or other fields (see Lesson 20).

HINT: Many other reports also show a list of transactions, similar to the Material Purchases report..

Job Cost Reports

Goldenseal includes several reports that show job costs for your projects.

HINT: For a quick snapshot of job costs, you can also use the Job Costs command (see Lesson 39).

To see a category breakdown of estimated versus actual costs, follow these steps:

  1. Choose Projects from the Reports menu, and choose Costs by Category from the submenu.
  2. Enter a project into the Project Account field.
  3. Click the Update button.
  4. You'll see a report of estimated and actual costs for each category.

You can also choose the following reports in the Projects menu:

  • Costs by Class-- Estimated versus actual, by class and category.
  • Costs by Subcategory-- Estimated versus actual, by category and subcategory (if subcategories are available in the project).
  • Costs by Location-- Estimated versus actual by location.
  • Itemized Costs-- Actual expenses, listed individually and grouped by category and subcategory.
  • Itemized Estimate-- Estimated expenses, listed individually and grouped by category and subcategory.

Other Reports

There are more than eighty reports available under the Reports menu.

Other parts of this manual have already covered some of the other reports, including the following:

Most of the remaining reports show accounts or transactions in a table, similar to the Material Purchases report. A few use calculators, similar to the Balance Sheet.

We can't always think of every possible report that might be useful. If there is something you'd like to see that is not already in a report, please contact us with your ideas! We will work it into a future version of Goldenseal.

HINT: A sketch or sample of the report is most helpful to us.

More Ways to See Data

You can also use the 'quick report' commands to see a quick summary of accounts payable, job costs, accounts receivable, undeposited funds and payroll.

If you want to see all the data for accounts or transactions, you can also use the Export command to create a text file with the contents of every record and every field.

Finishing Up

This lesson has shown you how to view financial reports.

You might want to take a break now and do something you haven't done for a while. Do you have a musical instrument in the attic? Has it been years since you played your air guitar?

Of course it goes without saying that all those activities will be enhanced if you also wear one of the chic hats from a previous lesson!

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