Accounting Reports: TrendBoard User Manual

TrendBoard measures the trends in about a dozen aspects of your accounting reports.  

There is no standard convention on how the entries in your Profit & Loss and Balance Sheet are named. 12Faces has adopted a set of names. If they are not the ones in your reports, go to the article Accounting Terminology Translator. For example, Income may be referred to as Revenue etc.

When you click on TrendBoard input, a form for data input will be displayed. This data is easily found in your Profit & Loss and Balance Sheet. A summary of each input is given below.  

The following are from your Profit & Loss Report:

• Period: is either annual, quarter or month depending on what matches the period your data that you are entering covers.
• End date: is the date at the end of the month of the period. For example, last day of the month, last day of the quarter, last day of the financial year.  Dates are expected in dd/mm/yyyy format and used for sorting purposes.
• Revenue: is the Income/Sales from your business. However, if you take money as cash, you should consider adding that in here as well. This is so that your Income will more accurately reflect your real Income.
• Operating Expenses: alternative names – COGS; Cost of Goods Sold; Cost of Sales; Variable Costs; Production Expenses.
• Gross Profit.
• Staff Wages: the money paid to your staff as Wages and Salaries. Include your own wage here if you are an owner. If you are not paying yourself a reasonable wage, consider increasing the Staff Wages by the extra Wage that you should be earning. This will give a better estimate of how profitable your business is in a real world situation. If you want a figure for your Wage, calculate what you would earn if you worked for someone else in the same position.
• Staff Benefits: any costs associated with the staff. For example: training, entertainment and travel. Also, if statutory requirements for Retirement, Health and other such charges are not in your Staff Wages figure in your Profit and Loss, they should be added here.
• Overhead Costs: the Fixed Costs of operating your business, for example, leases, bank interest, electricity etc. In most instances, the Staff Salaries and Wages will also be included in this figure. That is what we expect when you enter your data into TrendBoard. Alternative names: Fixed Costs; Overheads.
• Operating Profit: is the bottom line Profit before Tax, reported in your Profit & Loss account. Alternative name: Net Profit.

The following figures come from the Balance Sheet:

• Accounts Receivable: the money that is owing to you by your clients.
• Opening Inventory and Work in Progress (WIP): the value of your Inventory at the start of the period.
• Closing Inventory: is the value of the Inventory and WIP at the end of the period.
• Total Current Assets: the money you have available to pay your debts in the short term.
• Non Current Assets: that can be turned to Cash in the longer term.
• Accounts Payable: is the money that you owe to others.
• Current Liabilities: the total amount you owe in the short term.
• Total Non Current Liabilities.
• Current Borrowings and Non Current Borrowings.

Reward is a figure that you should calculate. This is the “Reward” that you get from operating a business if you are the owner.
To calculate this:

• Include your actual Salary plus your actual Benefits. For example, training, entertainment, retirement payments like Superannuation (in Australia).
• Also include any “perks” that you are paying yourself. For example, gym memberships, video streaming etc.
• Add in the Total Operating Profit.

Combined, these represent financial benefits that you are getting from the business. In most cases, you want to maximise your Reward. You certainly want to see any trends over time.

That is the end of the data entry. Ensure that you hit submit to store the information.

You will immediately see this data appear on the DashBoard. Note that you may need to refresh your screen to get an update.