Reporting
Every figure leads back to the entry behind it
Forty-nine reports, each runnable over any period you choose, on a ledger that holds money as whole pence so two screens cannot disagree about a rounding.
The library
One place, searchable
Every report the product carries, in one list with a search across it, rather than scattered through the screens they happen to relate to. Star the ones you run every month and they come to the top.
A saved view remembers the period, the comparison and the columns, so the management pack you produce in March is produced the same way in April.
- Profit and loss
- Balance sheet
- Trial balance
- Detailed P&L
- Cash flow
- Changes in equity
- Aged debtors
- Aged creditors
- Nominal ledger
- Management accounts
- Budget variance
- Cash forecast
What makes a report trustworthy
Six things most reporting gets wrong
None of these is a feature anybody asks for by name. Each one is the reason a set of management accounts gets sent back.
Comparatives the company actually had
A period the company really ran, not the same dates a year earlier. A short first period compares against something real, and a year to 28 February compares against the year to 28 February.
Drill from the figure to the document
From a total on a report to the account, from the account to the entry, and from a general ledger line through to the invoice or bill itself. No exporting to a spreadsheet to find out where something came from.
It says what it could not work out
A figure that cannot be derived is named rather than printed as nil. A report that is quietly incomplete is worse than one that refuses, because both look finished.
A layout cannot change a figure
Sections can be reordered or hidden and a firm can add its own subtotals. Hidden sections come off the page and their figures stay in every total, and the report says what was hidden. The plain version is one click away.
Multi-period in one run
Twelve months across, or four quarters, on the same statement rather than twelve separate runs pasted together.
By property, site or contract
Income, costs and result for each one, with a total that agrees with the profit and loss report rather than being kept in a separate spreadsheet that does not.
Management reporting
The pack, and the forecast
Management accounts with the budget beside them, and forecast outturn that is not the budget column: the months that have happened at what they were, and the months that have not at what they are expected to be, shown separately in every row.
The cash forecast builds from committed movements in the ledger, recurring journals that touch a bank account, and payroll from the pay dates actually posted. Every line in it comes from something already in the books, and the screen lists what it has assumed underneath the figures: which customers' own payment histories moved a receipt off its due date, that VAT is the balance now standing on the account, and that wages repeat the middle of the last three runs.
Running them, and sending them
A report is a question, asked again next month
What a library is worth depends on how little work it takes to ask the same question again, and on it saying plainly what it will not do.
Report packs
A named set of reports run together with a cover and a contents page. It stores the questions rather than the figures, so running it next month asks them of next month's ledger. A report that fails is named and the rest of the pack still runs.
One slice at a time
Any report run for a single property, project or fund, with a residual column so the slices still add back to the whole business. On the balance sheet it carries the caveat on the face of the report: cash and debtors are untagged, so it will not balance, and that difference is not an error.
Cash basis on the profit and loss
The ledger is untouched and the basis is printed on the report, so it survives being exported and read a year later. Offered there and nowhere else: a cash basis balance sheet without its debtors and creditors is not a shorter balance sheet, it is a different document.
Scheduled delivery, said honestly
A schedule fires when the firm's own machine is running Murgese, and catches up when it next starts. This is on-premise software: there is no server in a data centre to send a pack at three in the morning, and the screen says so rather than letting a client find out by not getting their January pack.
Analyse with AI, if you turn it on
The answer sits beside the figures, not in them
Off when the software is installed. A firm that wants it connects an account of its own, and nothing is sent until somebody presses the button.
On the profit and loss, the balance sheet and the trial balance, on the management accounts, on the dashboard and on the VAT return, Analyse with AI sends the report as it stands on the screen and brings back a headline, the points worth checking, and the questions to put to the client. The report itself does not change: the figures are the ones the ledger produced, and the answer is written beside them.
Every amount and percentage in that answer is looked for in the figures that were sent. Anything that cannot be found there is marked against the sentence it appears in, so a number nobody can trace is visible before it is read out to a client. What a request carries, and what comes back
Laying a report out your way
A layout cannot change a figure, and that is the whole safety of it
Sections can be moved and sections can be hidden, and a firm can add lines of its own: Staff costs as the sum of wages, employer national insurance and pension, printed as one line because that is how the client thinks about it.
Every one of those is computed from the same account balances the report uses without a layout. Nothing in a layout can alter an amount, add an amount, or make a total disagree with the accounts it is made of. A layout that could do any of that would be a second set of books with a nicer name.
Hiding is the one that needs watching, and it works the way hiding nil accounts already does: the section comes off the page, its figures stay in every total, and the report says how much was hidden. A section that silently left the profit would be a report that lies about the profit.
Practice edition
Reports about the firm, not about a client
Everything above is a report on a set of books. A firm has a second set of questions, about itself: which services make money, where the lock-up is and whose it is, how much of a job's elapsed time the firm actually owned, what the next few weeks are carrying and what the fees are likely to be. Those are thirteen reports on their own screen in the Practice edition, and each one states on its face what it cannot see.
See the reports against your own figures
Bring a period you already know the answer to. The fastest way to judge a report is to run it on numbers you can check.