Reports

This standard governs the financial reports of All About Pawz, LLC: the Profit & Loss, the Balance Sheet, the Trial Balance, and the General Ledger: how they are run and, more importantly, how they are read. The reports are the authoritative financial statements: they read the books. The Accounting Dashboard is a summary built from operational records; where the dashboard and a report disagree, the report governs, subject to the exclusion stated below. The Accounting Operator runs the reports; the Accounting Manager reads them first, owns every explanation attached to them, and approves their release outside the accounting function.

The four reports

1. Profit & Loss. Takes a tenant and a date range. Returns one row per revenue and expense account with its debit total, credit total, and net: revenue netted as credits minus debits, expenses as debits minus credits: plus a final total row carrying rolled-up revenue, expense, and net income. This is the "did the Company make money" report. It is run monthly, and always for a closed period; a Profit & Loss run mid-month is a progress report, not a result.
2. Balance Sheet. Takes a tenant and an as-of date. Returns assets, liabilities, and equity with section totals, treating contra accounts correctly: a contra asset reduces its section rather than appearing as a negative asset. This is the "what the Company owns and owes" report. The as-of date matters: a balance sheet is a snapshot, and running it for yesterday rather than today can differ by every transaction posted in between.
3. Trial Balance. Takes a tenant and an as-of date. Returns every account with its total debit and credit activity through that date, plus a totals row in which debits shall equal credits. This is the integrity report: its first job is not to inform but to prove the books are internally consistent. A Trial Balance whose totals do not agree means a posting broke double-entry somewhere, and nothing else that day matters more than finding it.
4. General Ledger. Takes a tenant and a date range, defaulting to year-to-date where no range is given. Returns line detail: every posted debit and credit: with a running balance per account, ordered by account, then date, then entry. This is the "show everything" report and the starting point of every investigation. Where a Profit & Loss figure looks wrong, the operator does not argue with it; the operator runs the ledger for the account and reads the lines.

All four are produced through the finance actions, which pass the operator's tenant and dates through unchanged.

The exclusion that matters

Every report includes posted entries only. Unposted entries, unposted invoices, pending payments, and failed postings are invisible to all four reports. That is correct accounting: what has not posted is not yet in the books: but it creates the Platform's most common confusion: the dashboard shows the sale and the Profit & Loss does not. The sale's bookkeeping entry either failed without reaching the operator, never existed: subscription renewals, processor-console refunds, and manual payments, under Sales and Payments (Accounting Payments): or remains unposted. The reports are not wrong; they state exactly which events have not reached the books. The gap list in Troubleshooting (Accounting Troubleshooting) exists for this.

Date discipline

1. The reports select on the entry date, not the date the entry was keyed. A March sale whose bookkeeping entry was posted in April still lands in March's Profit & Loss. That is correct: the economics happened in March: but it means late postings change closed results. The discipline is: post promptly, and where a posting must be late, note which period the entry actually belongs to.
2. A Profit & Loss that changes after it has been reported requires an explanation attached to the revised report, under the failure modes below.
3. For the Balance Sheet and Trial Balance, the as-of date is inclusive: "as of March 31" includes March 31. Off-by-one date errors are the most common reason two people's balance sheets disagree.

Reading the reports

Profit & Loss, first pass:

1. Revenue by account: does the mix look right? A month in which revenue is sound but the wrong accounts carry it indicates line-level coding errors: invoice lines posted to the wrong revenue account, under Invoices.
2. Expenses: any account at twice its normal rate has its ledger pulled and read.
3. The total row: net income, compared with the plan and with the same month of the prior year before anyone draws a conclusion.

Balance Sheet, first pass:

1. Cash and checking: do they agree with the bank reconciliation under Banking?
2. Receivables: does the total agree with the receivables aging under Invoices? Where the control accounts do not agree with their detail, stop: statements built on top are unreliable until that is resolved.
3. Liabilities: tax payable, deposits, and gift cards: all three should move in a sensible relation to sales. A deposits liability growing while appointments are level means deposits are not being applied, under Deposits.

Trial Balance, first pass:

1. The totals row: debits equal credits: always, without exception.
2. Then scan for accounts with unexpected balances: an asset with a credit balance, a revenue account with a debit balance. Some are legitimate: a refund-heavy day can net revenue negative: and most are coding errors.

General Ledger, first pass:

1. Filter to the account in question and read in date order. Every line's memo and source reference shall explain itself.
2. Lines with empty memos and no source reference are defects to correct at the source record, under Books.

Failure modes

1. Reports disagree with the dashboard. Expected: the sources differ: posted books against operational records. Reconcile by listing the unposted and never-posted events from the gap list in Troubleshooting (Accounting Troubleshooting), not by adjusting either side.
2. Profit & Loss changed after month-end. A late posting landed in the closed period. Identify the entry by its source reference, confirm it belongs in that period, and attach the explanation to the revised report. Where late postings are routine, the defect is in the posting process, not the report.
3. Trial Balance out of balance. The posting function rejects unbalanced entries, so a persistent imbalance means either a manual entry bypassed the safeguards or an earlier correction edited posted lines directly. Find the entry in which debits do not equal credits: the ledger ordered by entry shows it: and correct it with a balancing entry, never an edit.
4. Balance Sheet does not balance. Assets not equal to liabilities plus equity means the underlying Trial Balance is off, or a report ran while a posting was half-completed. Re-run the Trial Balance first; where it agrees, re-run the Balance Sheet. The Balance Sheet is never adjusted to force it to balance.

Controls

• Reports are produced from posted entries only and are never edited, restated by hand, or adjusted to agree with the dashboard, a bank statement, or an expectation. Every correction is an entry in the books under Books; the report is then re-run.
• A closed period's reports are the record of that period. Where a late entry changes them, the revised report carries the explanation; the earlier report is retained, not replaced silently.
• Separation of duties: the person who posts the entries a report is drawn from does not approve the report's release outside the accounting function.
• Tax figures in any report released for filing are drawn under Taxes and reconciled before filing.

Records created and where they are kept

Each run of the four reports for a closed period, with any explanation attached, is kept with the period's close records in the accounting system and retained under the Regulatory Record Retention Policy.

Escalation

A Trial Balance that will not agree, a control account that will not agree with its detail, or a report required for legal process goes to the Accounting Manager the same day; legal process goes to legal@aapawz.com. Report or posting system failures go to support@aapawz.com.

Review cadence

The four reports are run at every month-end close; the Trial Balance is also run weekly as an integrity check. The Accounting Manager reviews this standard annually and whenever a report's basis changes.