 zero accounting software reports overview get ready to be an office hero with zero here we are in our custom zero home page we set up in a prior presentation gonna zoom in a bit holding down control scrolling up on the mouse wheel to get to 175 percent zoom in opening the demo company but doing so by hitting the reset button resetting the data and opening the demo company at the same time we're gonna be opening up our standard two reports like we do every time in the new tabs hiding this icon first right clicking the tab up top duplicating it right clicking on that tab duplicating it again and then go into the middle tab and go into the accounting drop-down we want the balance sheet report and then tab to the right and let's now pick up accounting and the income statement report these are the major two financial statement reports we have been opening up every time back to the tab in the middle let's change the date bringing it to a custom date of 2022 and there we go and that's the setup process that we have been doing every time support accounting instruction by clicking the link below giving you a free month membership to all of the content on our website broken out by category further broken out by course each course then organized in a logical reasonable fashion making it much more easy to find what you need than can be done on a YouTube page we also include added resources such as Excel practice problems PDF files and more like QuickBooks backup files when applicable so once again click the link below for a free month membership to our website and all the content on it so usually every time we open up the file we're gonna have the informational tab that's all usually put on the left-hand side when I'm entering data such as forms and so on and then the major financial statement reports balance sheet and income statement which we could replace with one report of a trial balance which we'll take a look at a little bit shortly and more in detail later and but so now we want to take a look at the reports in general so I'm gonna keep these three tabs I'm gonna open one more tab right click and duplicate the tab again and just explore some of the other reports now as we do so want to keep in mind these two reports are the main reports whenever we look into reports we kind of get overwhelmed or it's easy to get overwhelmed by the number of reports but if you kind of think in your mind hey look these two are the financial statement reports pretty much all other reports are giving more detail expanding upon one or multiple line items on the balance sheet or the income statement then it's a lot easier to kind of sort in your mind these other reports so let's just give a quick recap of the balance sheets you will recall that the balance sheet stands for as of a point in time where we stand as of a point in time it has assets it's got liabilities it's got the equities the assets represent what the company has in order to help generate revenue in the future broken out into current assets and fixed assets and then possibly other assets that aren't current and then we've got the liabilities that represents stuff that we owe to other people third parties part of the financing of the business so that we can finance the assets we have to generate the revenue current liabilities in there and then long term if we had any and then the equity represents the book value of the company which could be calculated assets minus liabilities or you can think about it as the owner share of the assets as opposed to the liability or third party shares own claims to the assets for example equity then being broken out by the type of company it is or business it is is it a company is it a sole proprietorship is it a partnership so you might have different accounts in here but equity as a whole is in essence the same and then the income statement is going to break out part of the activity how we have done over a past time frame typically a year so we've got income and expenses this is our performance report to show how well we did revenue and expenses being the primary two categories of the report now keeping that in mind let's go to the right and look at the other reports and just get a glossary overview of them and how they relate to the major financial statement reports so we're going to go into the reports drop down or the report center let's call it and see what else we have here so also just realize whenever you're thinking about a data input form such as any of these items you want to consider first what's the major impact of that data input on the financial statements and then consider any other subsidiary ledger impact that it might have and that'll help you to kind of give a thought process through these reports now up top we've got the favorites those are marked off with this little star so if you go down to all the reports below and you add a star to any of them they're going to be brought up into the favorite reports so clearly up in here most people will have the balance sheet and the income statement because those are the major financial statement reports if they're in the favorites and you hit the drop down they're going to be under the star item so you could find them just go into the drop down without having to go into the reports at all which is nice now let's go down to the financial reports next we got the financial performance and some of these reports organize the data into a nice snapshot type of view and or give information designed for like budgeting out into the future now we do want to keep a difference in our mind from the budgeting process and the accounting process the accounting process organizes the financial transactions that are entered possibly and primarily from the standard forms that are going to record past financial transactions in order to create the financial statements and related reports balance sheet and the income statement budgets are designed to project into the future and think about what is going to happen into the future to give us an idea of how well we're doing performance wise budgeting is a great tool but note it's not solely in the realm of the accountant oftentimes or primarily because it's going to take not only the accounting knowledge that the accountant has to organize the reports but it's also going to take kind of speculations on how much advertising do you project to have next year or what do you think the market's going to do all that kind of stuff that management needs to know now if you're small business you might be doing your own budgeting of course and therefore these tools are going to be useful for your taking your past data and try to making projections from it into the future however if you work in accounting departments you want to keep those two things kind of separate in your mind the accounting tasks and the budgeting tasks and if you're a bookkeeper you want to keep in mind that you can't generally just automatically create the budgets or at least not very detailed ones without the input from the owners of the business because they're the ones that are going to give you the the other data other than past financial data to project out into the future okay so that said we've got kind of these snapshot reports analytics this gives you your data in like a kind of a fancy snapshot it's not not really a traditional kind of report it's trying to give you those those pictorial views so could be useful but not not exactly the the standard financial statement reports you would generally be thinking of when we're when we're going into our reports and if i go to the other one here this is going to be short-term cash flow so oftentimes our financial statements as we know are on an accrual basis by default typically which will be dependent on how we're setting up our business meaning do we have to invoice our clients or do we collect cash at the point of sale and so considering our books are going to be on an accrual basis if we're using an accrual system it could of course be useful to think about our cash flow and make sure we're okay with the cash flow and this could help us as a tool for you know cash flow projections into the future so once again this is kind of a projection type of tool we might go into it a little bit more detail later but it's not like a traditional type of reports so it's a it's a neat tool though but we'll go we'll go back to the reports and just give an overview of them and so then we've got the budget manager budget summary variants these are types of reports that are projections into the futures as opposed to traditional accounting reports that are given information about past data we might talk about budgeting in like its own section business performance information so if i go into the business performance we have another nice tool and it's given you some of the kind of ratio analysis of your reports which is really neat because because a lot of times a lot of these automated tools you can take your financial statements and give some of your ratio analysis which can help you in the decision-making process and a lot of like tools out there they they're separate from the accounting software to give you this kind of analytical data but now you can you can get this kind of data in the system so once again this isn't really normal financial reporting but it is part of the reporting that is based on past data which is usually more of a managerial type of thing because you do these ratios analysis in order to make projections out into the future so neat tool here that the zero has on that one so back to the reports so that's taking the relation between the reports and trying to and using them to to make decisions or get some more information that could be made decisions upon so then we have the cash summary this is another interesting report that you might not see in a lot of other accounting software looking like it's breaking out the income statement on more of a cash flow basis as opposed to say an accrual basis which is kind of like a statement of cash flows on using a direct method for the operating section we'll talk about the statement of cash flows later it's a major financial statement report but it's usually made after and constructed from the balance sheet and the income statement and usually they use the indirect method because it's often required so we don't get to see oftentimes kind of like the direct method which is more intuitive kind of breaking down the income statement on like a like a cash type basis in essence so you could see your you got your sales here if i went for the this is for the month ended let's take this for the year let's say we say it's going to go from January 1st and update it so now we've got our cash flow here 2022 227 86 if i compare that say to the income statement we have the 300623 86 so i won't dive into that report in more in a lot of detail right now but it's an interesting report that you might not see in a lot of other accounting softwares let's go back to the reports and go to the some of these that will you will most likely often see in other accounting softwares so we went to we just did the finance reports let's go to the financial statements obviously these are the standard ones where we have the balance sheet and the income statement checked off as favorites so we've seen those we've got a blank report so we can kind of construct our report we've got depreciation schedules which again is another kind of interesting area we'll talk about depreciation in a future presentation nothing's in it at this point in time the appreciation is related to if i go to the balance sheet and we go to the the fixed assets we're going to have to allocate the cost in depreciation now it gets confusing to do that because you might have different depreciation schedules for tax basis versus an accrual basis oftentimes we might be reliant on tax software to help us to organize our depreciation schedules but sometimes tax the accounting software could have the capacity to do some of that internally and then the question is do you want to use the internal stuff or just use adjusting entries and use the tax software so we might discuss that more in future presentations this is another report that is interesting and you might not see all the time in other financial software so then we've got a disposal schedule also related to basically the fixed asset fixed asset reconciliation we've got the income statement we've got the management report let's take a look at that one so again an interesting report that you might not see in another a lot of other of of the softwares we got the cash received cash spent cash credit card payments surplus closing bank balance profitability so it's kind of a kind of a snapshot type of report that might be useful for management given you you know the change on the right hand side direct cross gross profit other income expenses balance sheet debtors creditors net asset sales so it's kind of giving you a snapshot type of report that could be useful for a you know a quick look of items so let's go back to the accounting drop down and go to the reports again now obviously we might be able to construct similar kind of reports like some of these by using some of the customization on the reports so you know we got a lot of data on the balance sheet on the income statement that we can then kind of customize and do comparative reports and whatnot so some other software like a quickbooks or something often has a lot of reports that are comparative reports within the report manager and a lot of those you can actually construct from using the tools to customize your reports so if you compare like these reports to something like a quickbooks or something you might say well there's a lot less reports here but that's because again a quickbooks might be putting a lot of reports in that are just comparative reports these reports up top are actually you know different things that you might not see and say like a quickbooks and the customization tools are different in zero than say a quickbooks and i think they're more flexible in some ways so you could have actually more flexibility in some ways which is which is interesting so in any case statement of cash flows so now we've got the statement of cash flows direct method so they're using the direct method here again that's interesting so now we've got the operating activities let's hit the drop down up top and go to that now the direct method i kind of like seeing it in the direct method that means that that you are basically reconstructing the income statement so when we do the statement of cash flows that's the that's the third financial statement so you got the balance sheet you got the income statement and then the statement of cash flows because the balance sheet and income statement are basically on an accrual based method you might think okay i would also link to see the cash flow because that's important too which since the income statement is really the activity report you can kind of try to reconstruct the income statement on terms of rather than an accrual basis and a cash flow basis so now you've got receipts from customers instead of sales and then payments to suppliers and then cash receipts from other operating activities so that's kind of neat the indirect method would be trying would would be a reconciliation method the downside of the direct method is that a lot of financial statement reporting places want to see a reconciliation indirect method because there is a reconciliation of the net income in essence in the operating section to the to the net income on cash flow versus accrual but interesting investing activities and you know the financing activities the general outflow now notice that this report ties into then the the cash flow so net net change cash and cash equivalents at end of the period 494633 so if i go to the balance sheet and we look at our cash here we're going to say 494633 so you can kind of think of the statement of cash flows as expanding upon the the cash component so it's kind of connected to the to the balance sheet account of cash but it's also of course basically reconstructing your financial statements instead of on an accrual basis basically on a cash flow basis where we'll dive more into the statement of cash flows in a future presentation reports let's see what else we got here we've got the statement of cash flow statement of owner's equity this is a this is another one that's nice to have and it could be a little bit confusing to set up i'm gonna i'm gonna try to set this from january let's go to 2022 2022 january and let's go to december 31st 2022 2022 december 31st okay so now we've got the statement of equity so it's just giving the opening balance current year earnings and the total equity so the equity is something that i i it's another report that you don't often see in other software like a quickbooks sometimes what quickbooks will do is they'll roll over the net income and try to try to roll it over so you'll actually see a net income in the equity section on like a quickbook software versus a zero software they're not doing that the zero software is actually more professional not to do that i think quickbooks is trying to kind of give an indication of hey look the balance sheet is connected to the income statement here's the net income as part of the equity section but it kind of messes up some of your reporting sometimes especially when you're doing like a partnership and you're trying to break out the income to multiple partners and now you got this net income showing up down there so it's kind of a messy a messy thing although they're trying to make it helpful i i i am a little skeptical in terms of setting up this the statement of equity and how well how flexible it is if you have a complex partnership with multiple partners statement of partners equity or or a more complex corporation on how easy it is to kind of break out that information but i like it i like that they have it there so we'll maybe dive into that in a future presentation back into the reports and let's see what else we we got the tracking summary actually wait this is not the one i was on i'm going to go back into the reports and we want to go to i was down here so statement of equity let's go to the payables so age payable detail and the payable summary so these these reports are going to tie into and these are traditional reports and all kind of accounting softwares typically let's go to the detail i'm going to open in a new window this time that might be a little better to do and so these reports should give you more detail about the balance sheet account of the payable so if i hit the custom date make this at the end of december so now we've got our payable breaking out the who we owe money to and the bottom line i just want to point out here is that the total is given a sub ledger 1029184 which should tie out to the balance sheet 1029184 so it's a sub ledger it's breaking out more detail about an account on the balance sheet so let's close that one out so we'll talk more about that in the future and then this will give you the detail aged receivable detail so let's let's just open up the summary on this one this is the same thing but on the balance sheet it's breaking out the accounts receivable 9172 63 if i change the date and end it on the 31st and update it now we've got it broken out by customer for the receivables uh 9172 63 so i just want to point out that this is giving that same information by customer and some accounts have that necessary added sub ledger so the receivables and the payables are the clear two that need a sub ledger that breaks out who owes us money and who exactly do we owe money to how old and outstanding is it so then we've got the billable expenses so if you have items that are billable you've selected them as something that you pay that you want to invoice then this is it'll give you information on that that's kind of a customized type of thing what we'll talk about billable items in the future a contact transaction summary so we've got the contact transactions here so that's going to be well let's take a look at it i should have i should have opened it in a new window so contact information so it's going to give us a drop down of our contact summary information so that's just interesting we might find that information or much of that information already by going to the contact drop down suppliers and customers here but we got reports for the contact information that possibly could be constructed in that case expense claim detail let's go into that one nothing is in it thus far i believe that report is is saying if a if if an employee you know it claimed it is claiming an expense or something like that i think it might tie into the mileage uh like if they're charging or if they're if they're trying to reimburse someone or something like that type of report so income and expense by contact so now we're breaking up an income line item by contact so if so so if i break this out 2022 okay so so now we've got the contact over here and we've got the income and the expenses so now we're breaking out the activity of income and expenses if i go back on to the income statement income here is in one lump sum line item now typically you don't want to break out the income uh to too many lines like you don't want to say i sold this kind of inventory that kind of inventory or this service that service because you might be able to get that added detail from subsidiary reports breaking it out by customer breaking it out by uh item what you sold so it's so that's why the income is usually like one or two a few lines whereas the the added detail you can break out by uh by customer and same with the expenses we put the expenses in here by category not by vendor who we paid typically and then we could have sub reports to break that out so we might be able to customize this report and filter it which we'll talk about more in future presentations but i won't get into all those options right now but it's backing up and supporting income statement accounts is what i want to get at at this point okay so then we're on so expense playable invoices detail so these are the the invoices that are going to be still outstanding and that ties into in essence the accounts receivable account because the invoice is the thing that increases the accounts receivable so now we are in essence looking at the receivables for the open invoices that's the detail uh receivable invoice detail or these are the payable invoices related to the accounts payable and the receivable invoice detail and you got to be kind of careful they sometimes interchange zero does this term of invoice and bill so you got to kind of think about okay it's a payable so that's a liability instead of i would think they would call it payable bill detail maybe and then receivable invoice detail or something like that so they're kind of mixing up that bill and invoice term it seems to me from time to time but little distracting not too bad once you get used to it and then of course you got the payroll reports these are reports in and of themselves that will be specific to payroll payroll as its whole whole world onto itself because uh you have a bunch of different reporting requirements in the united states we have of course the the payroll taxes and withholdings and whatnot and then human resources requirements form 940s 941s w2s w3s all that stuff it's going to require added reporting information that could be constructed but only in zero software if you have payroll turned on and you're processing payroll through the system otherwise you might process payroll with a third party provider that might help you out with some of those added reports and just add the detail in the system necessary then you got the reconciliations the main reconciliation report is going to be the bank reconciliation and possibly credit card reconciliation reports these are not like normal reports in that they're not being constructed when you do the financial when you when you when you add financial transactions there i would call them internal control reports they're going to be tying out our financial data to what is on the bank statement you can think of them as kind of supporting the in the balance sheet account of cash but they're really doing a lot more than that because if we can verify all the transactions in cash because there's a double entry accounting system it's actually given a huge internal control on everything else as well so we'll get into those reports in their own section 1099 reports in the united states we have reporting requirements for employees to get a w2 and then 1099s if you're paying like a contractor so the government my interpretation is basically the government saying hey we have an income tax we want to know if you paid someone else because it's income to them if you paid a business that's incorporated we're not going to worry about that because we think we have enough leverage over them we've already got them by the throat right there if we don't need you to wrap them out right but if you're paying contractors then we think that those guys might try to go under the radar and we don't have them by the throat yet you know so we need you we need you to help us get them so so give us a 1099 report for those small contractors so it's going to be another kind of burdensome thing that we'll have to set up just so that we can obviously be in compliance with that so foreign currency gains and losses and the general ledger is going to be a major kind of report that kind of gives you the detail which is similar to if i clicked on any of these accounts the activity report is typically kind of like the general ledger given you the detail the transaction detail so the general ledger should give you kind of all the accounts is what traditionally will be there the general journal let's go into that report so now the journal the journal entries are going to be the debits and credits typically that you that you enter uh into the system so we've got yeah the debit and credits so they're showing us the transactions in terms of debits and credits this is just for the month of december so that can be an interesting report because it can help you to see what has been happening and and then and then look at it in terms of debits and credits because most of the data input that we're doing is not in terms of debits and credits so you you could go in here and kind of kind of look at this report to see that you also may be able to use a report like this to try to bill out your clients for example you might say hey look if i have so many transactions or so many accounts that are affected within a certain range i'm going to bill you based on how many accounts so if you're within this range i'm going to charge this much if you're so that's a one concrete way that you might be able to get away from charging based on just uh on on just time which can be a little little bit uh nubious kind of hard to track and whatnot so then you got your sales tax report we'll probably get into sales tax in the future that's another taxes always complicate the system trial balance this is a great report that gives the information in terms of debits and credits as opposed to the balance sheet and income statement so if i change this to the year of january january 2022 let's say and or december let's go to the end of december what am i doing what are you doing so then we've got the debits and credits over here so it you can think of it as in essence the balance sheet on top of the income statement but you don't have all the subtotals so it's basically the balance sheet uh what happened here this is this is not the balance i'm gonna go back i gotta go back and so here's the balance sheet and so balance sheet but it has all these subtotals and whatnot on top of in essence the income statement assets liabilities equities income and expenses this is going to be ordered by the code up top so you notice the checking account was not the top account on the balance sheet because it was overdrawn so it was a liability got flipped to a liability but in essence balance sheet accounts on top of the income statement accounts the reason this is a useful report in practice is that you can open this report if you're used to it instead of the balance sheet and the income statement and as you enter financial transactions as you enter the data forms when you want to check them to the activity on the financials you can open this report and you can drill down on the activity in the same way as the balance sheet in the income statement but now you only have one tab open instead of two and it's a shorter report due to the fact that you don't have all the subtotals although you got to be able to understand where the cutoffs are these are assets assets they give you the nice the types here some other softwares don't do that so you can actually see where the assets liabilities and equity are so nice report to to work with so we will deal with that later transaction account account transactions so let's open that one up account transactions so we can choose the account here accounts receivable you get a multiple accounts and so it's kind of like a customization report that gives you the detail of the transactions so that's kind of nice if you select if you select all this gives you the transactions for everything and so this is kind of similar if you select all of them to that journal report where it gives you it gives you all the activity that's happening but this might give you all the transactions so i'm i'm thinking that maybe you can count the transactions here although there's a lot of subtotals that might be a little difficult for your billing so you might count like the actual transactions or use the journal report to count all the all the accounts that are impacted but anyways you can experiment with that report detailed detailed account transactions so now you've got this similar with the detailed i won't go into that now we're running short duplicate statement lines so these are the other major two we've got the inventory item detail this of course given a report that's going to give detail and more information about the balance sheet line item of inventory which we don't have one here so if you have inventory it would only be relevant if you had inventory sales by item report that's breaking out a sales line item uh by what you sold which is going to be service items and inventory items so that's a quick overview of all the reports my goal here's kind of was to try to say hey look most of these reports are tying into an account on the balance sheet and the income statement which i kind of got tripped up on because they started us out with all these future oriented reports which are neat and nice kind of kind of reports but they're not as traditional accounting reports but we'll dive into to more of these reports in more detail in future presentations and also i just want to note that the customization we'll get into some of the customization which can also give us more reports like comparative reports and whatnot and they've got some interesting and some some good tools that are in some ways more advanced than some other accounting softwares for example like a quick book so zero's got some good stuff there