Custom Financial Statements Beta
Custom Financial Statements let you build your own variants of the Profit & Loss Statement or the Balance Sheet, choosing exactly which comparison columns you want to see on each one — without having to request a custom report from AdmCloud.
What is it and what is it for?
AdmCloud's standard Profit & Loss Statement and Balance Sheet reports already show common columns (current month, prior month, current year, prior year, variances, and so on). A Custom Financial Statement is a template you define yourself, where you pick — from a list of over 50 available columns — which ones you want to show and in what order, to build exactly the report you need to present to your management, board or investors.
It doesn't replace your chart of accounts or the standard reports: it's an extra layer that reorganizes and compares the same accounting data using whichever combination of columns you choose. Once the template exists, you can generate it as many times as you want — the report is always calculated with the most current accounting data.
There are two kinds of template, and each template is of a single kind (it cannot be changed after it is created):
- Profit & Loss Statement (P&L): organizes your accounts into the Revenue, Costs, Gross Result, Expenses, Other Revenue, Other Expenses and Net Result sections.
- Balance Sheet: organizes your accounts into the Assets, Liabilities and Equity sections.
How to use this screen
- Open it from the Profit & Loss or Balance Sheet report. Custom Financial Statements is reached through a button inside the Accounting Profit & Loss and Balance Sheet report screens, not from a standalone menu entry. From there you can create a new template or open one you already built.
- Give it a name and choose whether to show account codes. The name identifies the template in the list and must be unique.
- Select the columns. On the left you'll see every column available for the statement type you're building (for a P&L, for example: this month's, this quarter's, this semester's and this year's values, their comparisons against the prior period or prior year, variances, percentages over revenue or gross margin, and comparisons against budget). Drag the ones you want into the panel on the right, in the order you want them to appear.
- Save the template. AdmCloud validates that it has a name and at least one selected column before saving it.
- Generate the report. From the list, the detail screen, or directly from the Profit & Loss/Balance Sheet screen, use the Generate button to calculate the report with the structure and columns you defined.
- Edit it whenever you need to. You can change the name, the selected columns and their order on an existing template at any time; the type (P&L or Balance Sheet) cannot be changed once created.
Key fields
| Field | What it's for |
|---|---|
| Name | Identifies the template in the list. It must be unique — you can't reuse the name of another existing template. |
| Type | Indicates whether the template is a Profit & Loss Statement or a Balance Sheet. It's set when the template is created and cannot be changed afterward. |
| Show account codes | When enabled, the generated report shows each account's chart-of-accounts code next to its name. |
| Selected columns | The ordered list of comparison columns that will be calculated and shown on the report. You must pick at least one. |
Available columns for a Profit & Loss Statement include: current month, prior month and same month last year; a breakdown of all 12 months, semesters and quarters; the same values accumulated year-to-date (YTD); differences and percentage variances against the prior period or prior year; each account's percentage of revenue or of gross margin; and budget columns (by month, quarter, semester or period) together with their comparisons and variances against actuals. For a Balance Sheet, the available columns are the current balance, the prior period/year balance, and their differences and variances.
Validations on save
- The name is required. A template cannot be saved without a name.
- The name cannot be repeated. AdmCloud rejects the save if another template already has the same name.
- You must pick at least one column. A template with no columns selected cannot be saved.
- The type (P&L or Balance Sheet) cannot be changed once the template has been created.
- A template with dependent records cannot be deleted. If another record in the system ends up linked to it, you must remove that dependency first.
Availability and permissions
This screen belongs to the Accounting module and is currently a Beta feature: it must be turned on in your account's Features/Feature Toggles administration (under "Custom Financial Statements") for the access button to appear on the Profit & Loss and Balance Sheet screens. If you don't see it available, ask your administrator to enable it or contact AdmCloud support.
Access is controlled with the Customization permission on the user group (the same one used for Custom Fields, Custom Reports and Client Scripts): the browse level is needed to view the list and detail, the add level to create new templates, the edit level to modify them, and the delete level to delete them.
Tips and common mistakes
Order the columns before saving. The order in which you drag columns into the right-hand panel is the order they'll appear in on the generated report — check it before saving so you don't have to reorder them later.
Pick the right type when creating the template. Since the type (P&L or Balance Sheet) can't be changed afterward, if you pick the wrong one you'll need to create a new template of the correct type instead of fixing the existing one.
It's a template, not a saved report. Every time you generate the report from a template, AdmCloud recalculates the values using the most current accounting data — it's not a snapshot of the moment you created it.