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Customize a financial statement

Owned by Denise McGettigan
Last updated: Jan 21, 2024
3 min read

If you have permission to manage financial statements, you can customize the layout and contents of a financial statement to meet your organization’s needs by adding and removing items and changing the order in which they display.

Rather than customize the default financial statements that come from your database, it is advisable to clone those statements and then customize the cloned versions. This ensures you always have the default financial statements as a baseline.

Statement setup window

You carry out your customization in the setup window of a financial statement.

In the Statements menu, click the name of a financial statement to open its statement setup window.

The statement setup window has two tabs, the Statement tab (opens by default) and the Accounts tab, as outlined below.

Statement tab

The Statement tab displays the financial statement name in the top left corner and has several rows underneath, which correspond to the top-level items in the financial statement, in the order in which they display.

Depending on the statement, you might see the following items:

  • Group - Used to group accounts into categories in the financial statement. Common groups (categories) are Revenue, Expenses, Current Assets and so on.

  • Calculation - Used for determining a value in the financial statement, such as Gross Profit, EBITDA, Total Assets and so on.

  • Spacer - Used for inserting white space between items in the financial statement.

  • Heading - Used for inserting headings in the financial statement. For example, you might want to add a descriptive heading to display underneath the financial statement name.

  • Balance - Available in Cash Flow statements only. There are two Balance rows, one each for the cash at the start and end of the period.

A reference in a bracket [] displays on each group, calculation and balance row. These references are used in calculations.

Accounts tab

The Accounts tab displays your chart of accounts. You can scroll down the list to see all the accounts or search by code, name or other property.

The Mapping column displays the category (group in the Statements tab) each account is mapped to.  If no mapping has occurred, the Mapping column will have no content. See Map accounts to a group.

Customization options

You can take the following actions:

See Customize a Profit and Loss statement and Customize a Cash Flow statement for more examples on how you can customize a number of elements in a financial statement, to create the statement that best suits your needs.