Financial statements provide information on the financial position and performance of your business. You should use this information to make informed business decisions.
Brightpearl provides several key financial reports you will want to review regularly:
- Profit & Loss Statement
- Balance Sheet
- Trial Balance
All the reports in Brightpearl are instant and up-to-date information. You can use the drill-down feature to investigate figures, as well quickly and easily export all the data to Excel.
Profit & Loss
A Profit & Loss report provides information on your financial performance; how much money have you made? How much did it cost you to make that money? What do you have left over after paying all your out-goings?
When you look at a Profit & Loss report, Brightpearl will check all the transactions in the Sales and Expense accounts to see how much profit has been made; your "bottom line" (If you sell stock, then you will need to make sure that any change in the cost value of your stock is included in any Profit & Loss report otherwise the figures will not be correct. Talk to your accountant or book-keeper for more information on stock valuation).
This shows the Profit & Loss calculation and from which nominal account code ranges the balances are drawn from in Brightpearl:
| Nominal Code Ranges | ||
| Sales | (4000 to 4999) | |
| less | Purchases | (5000 to 5999) |
| = | Gross Profit | |
| less | Direct costs | (6000 to 6999) |
| less | Overheads | (7000 to 7999) |
| = | Net profits |
To view your Profit & Loss report, go to Reports > Profit & Loss. Brightpearl automatically displays 4 periods of 1 month (the current month plus 3 previous months) Profit & Loss statements. Use the filters to view statements as of a specific date, for a particular department, project or lead source.
Balance Sheet
Your Balance Sheet gives information on your financial position at a particular point in time. This report shows you how much you own and how those assets were funded.
When you generate a Balance Sheet, Brightpearl will look at all your Asset accounts and give you a net balance.
| Nominal Code Ranges | ||
| Assets | (0000 to 1999) | |
| (e.g. Stock, customer invoices, bank accounts) | ||
| less | Liabilities | (2000 to 2999) |
| (e.g. Loans, credit card, supplier invoices) | ||
| = | Capital | (3000 to 3999) |
| (e.g. Share capital, profit) |
To view your Balance Sheet, go to Reports > Balance Sheet. Brightpearl automatically displays the Balance Sheet for today's date. Use the filters to view the Balance Sheet for a different date or for a specific department or project. You can view a balance sheet up to any date you wish. This will include all transactions in your system to date (since the start of the financial year).
Trial Balance
Your Trial Balance lists all of your nominal ledger accounts (or General Ledger accounts) and the balance in the account. The purpose of a trial balance is to prove that the value of all the debit balances equal the total of all the credit balances. It is important to review this report regularly in order to identify errors in the nominal ledger accounts. Although the Trial Balance will identify that an error exists, it isn't capable of telling you where the error is in your accounting, this will require you to do further investigation. It is important to ensure accurate reporting of the nominal ledgers for use in financial reporting of a business's performance. Any error must be found before a Profit & Loss statement and Balance Sheet can be produced.
Drill-Down
You can drill-down into any of the account balances displayed on the Profit & Loss and Balance Sheet to display a listing of the accounting entries that make up that balance. Any figure that is blue means you can drill-down to further detail. As you drill into figures you'll discover further routes, depending on the account, into Order IDs, Journals and expense Claims. This makes it easy for you to investigate figures. To go back to the original report use the back button on your browser. Or hold down the CTRL key as you drill-down to open it in a new window/tab in your browser.
Export
Being able to export data to Excel allows you to work with the figures in your own way. The export will transfer all the data currently displayed on your screen, ready formatted, into an Excel spreadsheet. This allows you to manipulate the data in your own way, create graphs and save reports to your computer. Click the Export button at the top of the screen, then select to export to PDF or Excel.
