Welcome to the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Today we’re looking at Financial Reports.

If you’ve ever needed a quick snapshot of where your business stands financially, this is the part of the system you’ll want to get comfortable with. NZRT’s platform includes a solid set of built-in financial reports, and once you know what each one does, you’ll find yourself reaching for them regularly. Let’s walk through what’s available and what each report actually tells you.

First up is the turnover by period report. This one gives you your revenue over a date range that you specify. So if you want to see how much came in during the last quarter, or compare this month to the same month last year, this is where you go. It’s your top-level revenue picture.

Next, you’ve got aged debtors. This report is all about money that customers owe you but haven’t paid yet. It breaks down outstanding customer invoices so you can see who owes what, and crucially, how long those invoices have been sitting unpaid. The older a debt gets, the harder it can be to collect, so this report is really useful for keeping your accounts receivable under control.

On the flip side, there’s aged creditors. Same idea, but pointing the other way. This one shows you what you owe to your suppliers. If you want to stay on top of your payment obligations and avoid any surprise overdue notices, aged creditors is the report to check.

Then there’s the VAT or GST summary, depending on where you’re operating. This pulls together your tax liability for a given period. When it’s time to file your tax return or check what you owe the tax authority, this report does the heavy lifting for you. It summarises the tax position cleanly so you’re not digging through individual transactions.

The trial balance is your more detailed accounting view. It lists all of your accounts and shows you the total debits and credits for each one. If you or your accountant needs to verify that the books are balanced, or you’re doing a period-end close, this is the report to run. It’s comprehensive and covers every account in the system.

Cash flow gives you a receipts versus payments view. In simple terms, it shows money coming in on one side and money going out on the other. This is important because profitability and cash flow are two different things, and a business can look profitable on paper while still having a cash problem. This report helps you see the actual movement of money, not just the accounting entries.

Finally, there’s the margin report. This one digs into profitability and margins, so you can see not just how much revenue you’re generating, but how much of that is actually profitable after costs. If you’re analysing which products, services, or clients are performing well versus which ones are eating into your bottom line, the margin report is where you’ll find those answers.

Now, once you’ve run any of these reports, you have a few options for getting the data out of the system. You can export in three formats. PDF is great if you need a clean, shareable document that looks polished for a client or a meeting. CSV is your go-to if you want to pull the data into a spreadsheet and do your own analysis or manipulation. And ODS is the open document spreadsheet format, which works well if you’re using tools like LibreOffice or any application that supports that standard.

If you want to go deeper after exploring these reports, two related areas worth looking into are Accounting Management, which covers how your accounts and transactions are structured in the first place, and Data Export, which goes into more detail about getting information out of the system in bulk.

So to recap, you’ve got seven core financial reports available: turnover by period for your revenue picture, aged debtors and aged creditors for managing what’s owed to you and what you owe, VAT or GST summary for your tax position, trial balance for your full account view, cash flow for tracking actual money movement, and the margin report for understanding profitability. And you can get all of that out in PDF, CSV, or ODS format depending on what you need to do with it.

That’s it for this episode of the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Thanks for listening.