 Zero accounting software, comparative balance sheet creation, get ready to be an office hero with zero. Here we are in our custom zero homepage. We set up in a prior presentation, zooming in a bit, holding down control, scrolling up on the scroll wheel currently at one seven five percent zoom in, opening the demo company but doing so with the reset button, resetting the data and opening the demo at the same time. We're going to open a few tabs up top duplicating the tabs to put reports in as we do every time. First hiding, right-clicking the tab up top to duplicate it, right-click the tab up top again to duplicate again, tab to the middle. We're going to go to the accounting drop-down, open up the balance sheet standard as we do every time, tab to the right to accounting drop-down. This time we want the P to the L, the profit to the loss, the income statement, tab back to the right and we're going to change the date and bring it up to a custom date for two thousand and twenty-two December and that's what we want updated. That's the 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. This time we're going to make a custom comparative balance sheet using the edit layout tools below. In prior presentations we looked at the balance sheet in general and we looked at some of the tools up top here remembering that as we learn these tools they're not just applicable to the balance sheet we can apply them to other reports as well. Also just note that the balance sheet and the income statement are the two primary end reports when you're thinking about applying these tools to any other report it's useful to think of them in terms of are they like the balance sheet and that they have one time frame as of a point in time or like the income statement which has a beginning and an end type of report that can have some implications in terms of the type of format teams you're going to do including comparative reports which we're going to be working on at this point in time. So we'll start with the balance sheet reports over here and we also saw that there's some custom balance sheet kind of layouts that we could do. So for example if I hit the drop down we've got the comparing items let's update that so this gives December and November, December 1st and then November so that's a neat and nice report so now however we might want to add some other columns here that will give us some more detail possibly a difference column. So instead of having like multiple comparative months or quarters or whatnot we might have another column over here saying give me the difference between these last two months out where do we stand as of one month versus the end of the other month and we could have a percentage difference as well percentage increase or decrease that we could add. So those I'm going to try to start with this report and add these other two items to it with the edit layout items down below. Now remember as we work in zero if I go to the first tab and I go to my accounting drop down and the reports we don't have as many kind of comparative reports in the defaults over here as some other software like a QuickBooks for example but I actually think that's kind of nice because they're not really flooding this area with too many reports because most of those reports you can construct from a standard report so if you want them we can construct them and that's what we'll do here we've got the default options up top and then we'll add some more things with the layout view. The layout view let's go ahead and click on it can be a little confusing at first but once you get used to it it's fairly intuitive but it has a lot more flexibility than some of the other some some other tools that might be used in other accounting software. So for example if I wanted to like collapse these items here I could show the report in a collapsed format like this and that will show like a summary balance sheet which we might talk about a little bit more later but if I update that just to check it out and I don't have to worry about this messing up my original balance sheet because I could just save this as a draft here so we don't want to to make it our default report but I can save it as a draft and I should still be able to open up a standard balance sheet and not have a problem with it. Let's go ahead and do that by the way let's go to the right tab and duplicate and make another balance sheet just so we can see a standard balance sheet as comparing to it let's open up another balance sheet here and just make this one as of the end of December 2022 so we have something to compare to so we'll have that so there's that let's go back to the first tab so so now so see how we collapsed it this could be a nice simplified view so you can just say instead of having all the details you just have the balances for the categories of accounts right so we can have those options which is nice let's go back to the edit layout again and we'll talk more about some of those different options later but I'm gonna expand these again expand all of these items and then what we would like to do is now we've got two columns up top so I'd like to add another column so just a quick a quick recap of the tools you've got a text block that you can add to it you've got a schedule they can add at the bottom you've got a footer you've got the rows so if I wanted to add rows in between these items we can add a row we've got the columns which is what we're gonna work with having a column to the right and you've got the page break and then you can delete some of these items over here and we can also group some items together which we might talk about in future presentations to show some of these drop-downs and and it's a kind of similar to making sub-accounts on other sorts where like a quick books or something like that but right now what I'd like to do is make another column to the right by the way just note that you can also say this notice I have the most recent column or amount first here if you want to see it the other way and like chronological order you have the capacity to do that right I can pull this one on either side so I can go December to November or November to December which that's neat flexibility that we have there on our reports okay so let's go ahead and add a column so I'm gonna add a column and I want to make it a formula column because I want to make a formula between these two items and the formula it's gonna be fairly straightforward I'm just gonna say I want to take the December numbers minus the November numbers I'm gonna say I'd like you to take December minus November see how neat that is and I can just have a difference column that I have constructed I don't want to show it as a percent I just want to show the actual number and then the heading I'm gonna say is going to be let's just call it the change the change or difference you might call it so I'm gonna say that let's go ahead and update the layout and check it out so I can update it and there it is so how neat is that so I can I subtract these two and there's the there's the change column so so now the next common step is to have a a percentage increase or decrease so if I pull out the trustee calculator the calculation usually looks something like this if I this is like a horizontal type of analysis so if that's the change or difference I got the two one nine four point five five divided by the prior month which is in this case is the six nine seven eight point oh eight so moving the decimal two places over thirty one point four four so let's try to do that calculation and add another column over here so I'm gonna go into the page layout and we're gonna say add another column and I'm gonna make it a formula column again and so I'm gonna say okay so there it is now let's say this is gonna be the change divided by the the prior month November I mean how neat is that that you could do so you can imagine a bunch of different flexibility you have within the system and other assaults were like a quick books or something like that if you wanted to do some more complex reports now you can build a report kind of like this in a quick books for example but with with kind of more the default settings but they're much more restrictive but you can imagine building reports within zero with these kind of formulas that are are more detailed it's kind of a neat thing I think so I so then this is gonna be I'll call it the percent change percent change and so let's update that and let's check it out let's check it out so it has to think about that when it's calculating so there it is so now we've got our change over here so that calculation here once again was the the change to one nine four point five five divided by the prior month which is six nine seven eight point oh eight so there we have it thirty one so there it is and now I might want to see that as a percent right I was gonna put it as a percent let's go back to the edit layout and make that show it as a percent update it boom calculates shows as a percent so cool so so that's a nice report now now we could adjust like up top I might call this like a comparative balance sheet comparative and you can change the name up top notice for some reason it's kind of it's kind of frustrating they don't let us change this item right here so so it's still going to have the company name and the as of because I might say well it shouldn't really be as of now because there's kind of like two dates down below so you would think you'd be able to change that but that's not gonna bother me too much if you wanted to change it you could export it to excel and change it there I don't believe you have the custom capacity to change it for some reason within the software which is kind of weird because everything else is so nice and flexible but so there we have that now we might want to like oftentimes we might want to like remove the decimal so sometimes I like to take the decimals out so I'll take that out and update that so now we've got the decimals removed this is still in percentage format looks a little bit cleaner that way so that looks nice so I will do too much more but I just want to note just some other things on the flexibility of this edit layout because we're just kind of like touching the surface on it just realize that you could change like the the ordering of these kind of accounts which is another thing that you have a lot less capacity to do in software oftentimes like a quick books for example and also remember you don't have to have the account numbers on so you one way you can change the order as you can as you can turn on your account numbers or your your account codes and that'll put the order not by alphabetical order within each category but by code but you can also I can hit the drop down and say I'm gonna take that off and go to my edit layout and and make the change down here as well so say I want say I want the office equipment above above the computer equipment so I can make that kind of change in here and update it as well so it doesn't go in alphabetical order within a particular category necessarily if I make some customizations like that so now I've got the office before the computer so that's again really neat stuff that we can do so now that you have that you could save it and of course export it if you did it if you needed to do more editing you could export it to excel I'm gonna save it just as a custom report right now just to show and I'm gonna call it a comparative I'm not gonna make it I'm not gonna make it my default I'm just gonna save it in the customs and then if I go back to the first tab and I go into my reports drop down here and we go into the custom reports hold on a second what happened hide this and then I'm gonna go let's do that again I'm gonna go into the reports and there's the reports I'm gonna go into the custom and there's our custom report so if I was to just open this up in the future in the following month let's say and I wanted to open it up and then my my layout is fine I can change the date then up top to whatever I want to change you know the date to and and then we have the layout saved so that's why you have a you have a lot more it takes a little bit more work a little bit more understanding to use this edit layout but this edit layout thing has way more flexibility within the actual software in zero than some other software so once you get the hang of it once you build the custom reports then you can you can have more customization within the zero software as opposed to having to like to export it to Excel and then make changes in Excel and so on that you would have to do like every time so I it's a really neat tool this this thing here that I that again could be a like a game changer for some people I feel like in terms of if you want to be able to do a little bit more customization in terms of just to look and feel an organization of your reports in this fashion so we've just touched the surface on it on this one we'll do a couple more like this but you can you can take a look at these tools and get a feel for them yourself