Financial Reporting

Each month you receive a Profit and Loss statement, a Balance Sheet, and a Cash Flow statement, by the 15th of the following month. They arrive on a schedule, so you can plan around them.

Those three reports answer three different questions, and it is worth being clear about which is which. The Profit and Loss shows whether the business made money over a period. The Balance Sheet shows what it owns and owes at a single moment in time. The Cash Flow statement shows where money actually moved, which is frequently a different story from profit. A business can post a strong month on paper and still struggle to make payroll, and seeing that coming means looking at all three together.

I also prepare budget versus actual comparisons, which is where reporting stops being a record and starts being useful. Knowing what you spent is history. Knowing you spent more than planned, in which category, and for how many months running, is something you can act on.

Custom reports cover whatever your business actually needs to watch. That might be revenue by service line, spending by project, or a single number you check every month. Standard reports are standard because they suit most businesses most of the time, not because they suit yours specifically.

Reports you cannot interpret are not much better than no reports, so I will walk through what the statements show and what changed since last month. The aim is that you can look at your own numbers and know what they mean, rather than filing them away and assuming someone else is watching.

All of it comes out of QuickBooks Online, Xero, or Wave, built on books that have been reconciled and categorized first. Reports are only ever as good as the records underneath them.