Sage 50 Accounts For Dummies, 3rd UK Edition

Chapter 18

Running Monthly Reports

In This Chapter

• Using Sage's standard reports
• Understanding the financial reports
• Viewing your audit trail
• Writing reports

Running reports is an opportunity to see how well your business is progressing. Reports show you if your business is meeting your targets, if you're bringing in as much revenue as you projected, and how actual costs compare with your budgeted or forecasted expenditures. Good reports are easy to understand and use headings that are meaningful to your business.

In this chapter I talk about the reports you can produce at the end of each monthly accounting procedure. I assume you've already run the month-end procedure and processed all the necessary journals, as I explain in Chapter 16.

Making the Most of Standard Reports

Whenever possible, I suggest you use the standard reports provided by Sage, as they're simple to run and provide most of the information you need.

Each section on the Navigation bar (apart from Quotations) contains its own reports. The Report icon is usually the last icon on the right hand side. For example, if you go to Customer and then Reports, you can bring up the aged debtors and customer activity reports; if you go to Bank and then Reports, you see copies of unpresented cheques. Clicking Nominal codes on the Navigation bar and then selecting the appropriate icon brings up the profit and loss report or the balance sheet report – the key financial reports that tell you how the business is doing.

Whenever ...