A forecast is only worth anything if it is there on a Tuesday.
Not at quarter end, and not after three days rebuilding a model somebody let go stale in January.
Start free trialTwo statements, and one number that has to appear in both.
Most reporting tools can produce a profit and loss. The question worth asking is whether the balance sheet next to it was built from the same entries — and whether anything checks.
- 01
Run it on any date, without closing anything first
The report is a query over posted entries between two dates. You can run September on the third of September and it will be right as at that morning.
- 02
A loss is only useful if you can see where it came from
Gross profit of £12,328.28 against £18,466.00 of operating expenses. Every line opens into the transactions behind it, down to the individual invoice.
- 03
That figure has somewhere to be
There it is in retained earnings, on the right. Not journalled across at year end by somebody who might have got it wrong — the same entries, read a second way.
Nobody journals the profit across.
Which is the only reliable way to make sure nobody journals it across wrongly. The strip at the foot of the balance sheet re-checks all three identities every time the report is drawn.
£33,281.34 = £12,357.06 + £20,924.28
The arithmetic on these screens is real, and it is meant to be checked. If a marketing page claims your books balance, the figures on that page had better balance too.
No consolidation step
The profit and loss, the balance sheet and the trial balance are three views of one set of entries. They cannot disagree, because there is nothing for them to disagree about.
Drill all the way down
Every total resolves to its entries, every entry to its source document. That is what makes a figure defensible when somebody asks how you arrived at it.
Figures shown are from a demonstration workspace.
Ask it the question you are actually worried about.
A forecast is only worth anything if the answer is there the moment somebody asks. Pick a decision and watch the next twenty-four months redraw.
If we hire six engineers in April, when does it stop hurting?
You go through a trough for ten months and come out the other side. Survivable — but only if you know the trough is coming before you sign the contracts.
Illustrative figures for a sample business, not a customer’s data. The point is not the numbers — it is that the answer exists at the moment the question is asked, rather than three days after it.
Your next month-end could be the last hard one.
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