Financial Statement (setup)

Where one statement in your year-end set is built: a Balance Sheet, a Profit and Loss, a schedule or a note, together with the lines it prints.

This is the design of the statement, not the statement itself. To read the figures, run the Financial Statement report.

When to use it

When the books are first set up, to lay out the statement set your auditor expects.
When a new line is needed, such as a new class of asset or a schedule that has to be broken out.
When the wording or the order of the printed statement has to change.

Before you start

Your chart of accounts and account groups are in place. The statement collects from them, so the grouping has to be right before the presentation can be.
Statement Type and Row Type are their own masters; you pick from them here.
This is an accounting design job. A wrong line changes what every reader of your accounts sees.

Where to find it

Setup > Report Setup > Financial Statement.

The fields on this screen

Section	Field (on screen)	What to enter	Required
Statement	Statement Name	for example Balance Sheet, Profit & Loss	No
Statement	Code	short code for example SFP, SPL	No
Statement	Statement Type	The kind of statement - Trial Balance, Schedule, Notes, Financial Statement, Sub-Schedule or Account Group.	No
Statement	Dr / Cr	natural balance side of this statement	No
Statement	Statement Set	Which statement set this row belongs to. Use 1 unless you keep more than one set of statements.	No
Statement	Display Order	Where this statement sits in the printed set. Lower numbers come first.	No
Statement	Page No	(not explained yet)	No
Statement Rows	Title	The wording of this line as it prints in the Particulars column.	No
Statement Rows	Row Type	Title, normal line, subtotal or grand total. A grand total gathers its own sources, so leave them empty.	No
Statement Rows	Dr/Cr	The side this line sits on. On a Credit line the net it collects is flipped. Blank uses the statement's side.	No
Statement Rows	Static Value	A fixed value or label to print instead of the calculated one. Leave it blank to show the worked-out total.	No
Statement Rows	Hide	(not explained yet)	No

How it works

The Financial Statement report is drawn entirely from what is set up here. There is no fixed layout built into the product: your Balance Sheet prints what these rows say it prints.

Statement Type decides how a statement is filled. A Trial Balance or Account Group statement fills itself by walking your books. A Schedule, Note, Sub-Schedule or Financial Statement is computed: each line adds up the sources you give it.
You write the lines in the Statement Rows grid as a tree: a title, then the lines under it, then a subtotal. The sources that give each line its figure are set on the Statement Row screen, not here.
A Grand Total line gathers its own sources, so leave its source list empty. It skips any normal line that a subtotal already covers, so no figure is counted twice.
Dr / Cr is the side the statement naturally sits on. A line left blank takes the statement's side. On a Credit line the collected total is flipped, which is how a liability shows as a positive number on the right side of the page.
Display Order decides where the statement sits in the printed set; lower numbers come first. Statement Set groups a whole set together, so one company can carry more than one presentation of the same books.

Your changes apply to every period, including periods already reported. Nothing is stored per year. The report is rebuilt from these rows each time it runs, so re-running last year's Balance Sheet after an edit gives last year's figures in today's layout. That is why a careless edit is expensive: it quietly restates the presentation of years you have already signed off.

Statements are per company. Editing yours does not affect anyone else's.

Tips and common mistakes

Print the statement before and after an edit and compare. A moved line is very hard to spot in the setup and obvious in the print.
A line that shows the right number with the wrong sign has a Dr / Cr problem, not a source problem.
If a statement's total no longer ties, look for a line counted twice. Usually it is a normal line gathered by both a subtotal and the grand total.

Statement Row holds the sources behind each line. See also Statement Type, Row Type, Financial Statement report and Trial Balance report.