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Read the income statement, balance sheet and ledger
See profit, financial position, and every movement behind them — each total traceable back to the entries that made it.
- Steps
- 4 · About 3 min
- Who can do this
- Owner · Manager · Accountant
Three views of the same posted journal: what you earned, what you are worth, and every movement underneath. Nothing here is calculated separately from your day-to-day work — an invoice you confirmed this morning is already in it.
The point of the screen is traceability. Every total can be followed back to the entries that produced it, which is what makes the statements defensible rather than merely printable.
Set the period
What to look at:
From — the start of the period.
To — its end. A month, a quarter, a year; the statements recalculate for whatever you choose.
Apply period runs it.
Read the three statements
Income statement — revenue and expenses for the period, and the result. This is the "did we make money" view.
Balance sheet — assets, liabilities and equity as at the end date. Horizon213 checks that assets equal liabilities and equity, and says so. If that check ever failed you would want to know immediately, which is why it is stated rather than assumed.
General ledger — every account, with its opening balance, each movement, and a running balance.
The difference between the first two is worth being clear about: the income statement covers a period, the balance sheet describes a moment. A month with excellent profit and no cash is a normal thing, and reading both together is how you see it.
Follow a total back to its entries
What to look at:
Account — choose one from your chart of accounts.
Open shows its ledger: the opening balance, every movement in the period with its source document, and the running balance.
This is the answer to "why is this number what it is". Every line names the document behind it, so a surprising total leads to the specific invoice, payment or manual entry that caused it.
Export for your accountant
Export ledger produces a CSV of what you are looking at. The journal and the VAT working paper export the same way from their own screens.
That is usually the handover: your accountant works in their own tools, from your exports, against figures they can trace back to documents when they need to.
These statements are as good as what has been recorded. They are not a review: nothing here checks that you have entered everything, only that what you entered adds up. That is what your accountant is for — and why exporting to them regularly beats presenting a finished set once a year.
Next, you might want to
- Post a manual journal entryRecord an accounting entry that no invoice, payment or stock movement produced — and only when that is really the case.
- Check your VAT before preparing the G50Reconcile the VAT your documents say you owe against the VAT actually posted, and clear the exceptions before you file.