Reports in kBooks are live: they read your books the moment you open them, so there is never a stale copy or a generate step.
The core statements
Profit and Loss and Balance Sheet run for any period, on an accrual or cash basis, compared against a prior period or a budget if you keep one. On the cash basis a paid sale counts when the money arrives, with its sales tax as a liability and its cost of goods beside it, and every cash report leaves out the same things (unpaid invoices, bills, credit memos and write-offs), so a detail report always adds up to its summary. Every number drills down: click it and the exact transactions behind it open in a window, newest first, with the date range in your hands. Spot something miscategorized? Fix it from the drill and the report reflects it immediately.
The custom report
When the question is more specific ("what did we spend on repairs, by building, this year"), build it in the custom report: choose the rows, the date range, and stack filters (accounts, classes, contacts, amounts, memo text). The account and contact filters are type-to-find: start typing a name and the list narrows as you type, and when only one name fits it fills itself in. The totals are computed over everything the filters cover, not just the rows on screen, so the answer is exact. A report worth keeping can be saved with a name and rerun any time; it remembers its filters and stays live.
Customers and vendors
Six reports answer the questions you would otherwise assemble by hand. Sales by Customer shows income per customer for any range - and its total is exactly your Profit and Loss income for the same range, because anything entered without a customer sits in its own "No customer" line instead of disappearing. Expenses by Vendor is the mirror for spend. Customer Balance tells each customer's story - what they owed coming in, every charge and payment with a running balance, where they ended - plus the average days they take to pay you. Vendor Balance does the same for what you owe. Transactions by Customer and by Vendor list every transaction entered for each name, one row per transaction.
The agings are as of today: an invoice, bill, payment or entry dated after today has not happened yet, so a rent check dated tomorrow still leaves the invoice owing its full amount today, exactly as the Balance Sheet for today shows it. Tomorrow the Aging takes it off.
Both agings net what a name already paid you (or you paid them) that no document has taken yet: an unapplied payment or credit shows as a minus in the Current column, so the Aging total matches the receivable or payable on the Balance Sheet. An entry made straight to Accounts Receivable or Accounts Payable (a journal entry, a refund check) is there too, under its name, so nothing that sits on those accounts is left off. Such an entry must name a customer (for receivables) or a vendor (for payables) when you save it. When a payment and a refund check (or checks paid out to the customer and repaid later) came in together from QuickBooks, kBooks records that one settled the other, so neither shows: the ledger already says nothing is owed. Void either one and the other comes back on the Aging. The Overview's A/R and A/P figures are these same totals, and its Cash is your active bank accounts plus cash held at a broker, through today.
The A/R and A/P Aging reports also gained an Open documents view: the flat list of every open invoice or unpaid bill with days past due. Tick Overdue only and it becomes a collections call sheet, with each name's phone and email right on the heading.
Sales by Item
Sales by Item shows what each product and service sold in the range: quantity, sales, share of sales, average price, cost of goods and gross margin. It counts invoice lines, credit memo lines (a return takes the quantity, the sale and its cost of goods back) and a deposit line that names an item, which is how a sale paid on the spot is recorded. A line typed on an invoice or credit memo without an item sits in its own No item line, so nothing on a sales document is hidden.
On Accrual a sale counts on the invoice's date. On Cash it counts on each payment's date, for the share that payment covered, and credit memos are left out, the same rule as the cash Profit and Loss. Cost of goods is what the stock actually cost when it left the shelf, so a service always shows none.
Click a line in Summary to see the documents behind it in Detail; click a row there to open the document. Show every item brings the whole list back. The class filter narrows it to the lines tagged with those classes.
Classes: one set of books, many answers
If you run several stores, buildings or lines of business inside one company, give each a class and tag transactions as they enter. Every report can then answer per class or for everything at once, without a second set of books.
Budgets
Enter a budget by account and month under Budgets, and the Profit and Loss can show actuals against it, with the difference doing the talking. A budget keeps the financial year it was made for: if you later change the month your year starts, its months stay where they were. If two people work on the same budget, the second save is stopped and names who saved first, so nobody's numbers are lost.
Cash-flow forecast
Cash-flow forecast on Reports shows where your bank balance is heading, week by week, for the next 4, 8, 13 or 26 weeks. It starts from what is in your bank accounts today and adds:
- Money coming in: open invoices at their due date, and recurring invoices on their schedule (before tax).
- Money going out: open bills at their due date, and the items on your Calendar that carry an expected amount and are not done yet, like rent or a loan payment.
- The rest of the budget (tick Fill the months from the budget): what is left of each month's budgeted income and spending after the invoices, bills and calendar items already counted, so a month you have not invoiced yet still shows what you expect. Accounts marked Not cash in the chart of accounts (depreciation, amortization and bad debt are marked for you) are left out, since that money never leaves the bank.
- Money waiting to be deposited: checks you have received but not taken to the bank yet count as money in today.
Anything overdue is counted in the first week, since the money has not moved yet. The top of the report shows today's cash, the totals in and out, the balance at the end and the low point. If the balance goes below zero, the report names the week; click any week to see the invoices, bills and budget behind it.
Handing the year to your accountant
The quickest handoff is the Year-end package on the company's Tax tab: pick the year, press Download, and one zip holds the trial balance, the general ledger, the working trial balance and adjusting entries from Tax workpapers, the Income Tax summary, the 1099 summary and detail, and every document dated inside the year, each listed in a README that says what it is. It is built from the books as they stand when you press the button, so freeze the year in Tax workpapers first if the figures must not move.
The Trial Balance report's download menu also offers the trial balance in the layouts tax programs import: one for Lacerte, one for UltraTax CS, and a plain sheet to paste into Drake's own template. Each is the columns that program's import asks for, with the amounts as real numbers.
Income Tax is the report an accountant asks for. It has three views of the same year.
Summary totals your books by the line of the tax return each account reports on. Detail lists the transactions behind every one of those lines, grouped under it, with the section total printed where the section ends. Preparation is where an account gets its line.
Pick the company's Tax form once, at the top. Everything below follows from it, and the choice sticks for every future year. If the company later changes its form (a partnership becoming an S corporation, say), every mapped account moves to the matching line on the new form; the few with no match are listed after you save and wait under Needs a line.
Preparation, and the fast way through it
The view opens on Needs a line - only the accounts that still need a decision, biggest first. Two other chips sit beside it: Assigned, and All accounts if you want the whole chart.
If the form has no balance sheet to file, like Schedule C or Schedule E, the asset and liability accounts are hidden and the screen says how many: they have nowhere to go on that return.
Each row shows what the account carries this period, so the ones that move the return come first and the ones with no activity sit at the bottom. Pick a line and it saves itself, straight away - there is no Save button. A line above the table confirms what was saved and offers Undo.
Suggest lines
Most of this is typing, not judgement: an account called "Insurance:Property Insurance" reports on Insurance and nobody is in doubt about it. Press Suggest lines and kBooks proposes a line for every account it can read confidently.
It weighs three things together:
- NAME - the words in the account's full path. "Maintenance:Repairs:AC" is a repair because "Repairs" is in it.
- TYPE - what kind of account it is. A long-term liability belongs on "Mortgages, notes payable in 1 year or more" whatever it is called, which matters most on property books where accounts are named after addresses.
- USED - what the ledger shows. A fixed asset carrying a credit balance is accumulated depreciation, however it was named.
Nothing is written yet. You get a list of every proposal with the account, what it carries, the line, and a chip for each signal that spoke, so you can see exactly why a line was chosen. Untick anything you disagree with and press Apply. Only the ticked lines are written, and every one can still be changed afterwards.
It stays quiet when the evidence does not agree, and tells you how many it left for you. That is deliberate: a wrong line that gets accepted ends up on a return, so silence is the better answer.
On a rental partnership or S corporation, tick Rentals on Form 8825 beside the Tax form picker. A partnership reports rental income and expenses on Form 8825 rather than in the main Deductions section, and no account name can say which kind of business you are - so you say it once, and every suggestion after that reads the Form 8825 line for the words it knows: repairs, taxes, insurance, utilities, professional fees. Leave it off for a trade or a service business and the general deduction lines are used instead.
It also learns from you. A line you have already chosen for an account named like this one - on this company or any other of yours - is offered again, translated to whatever the current form calls it: what you mapped to Repairs on a Schedule E property comes back as Repairs and maintenance on a partnership. Only your own books teach your books; another customer's chart never does.
More rows on screen
The Expand button at the left of the report toolbar gives the report the whole window, which is worth doing on a long Profit and Loss or a General Ledger. While it is expanded the same button turns solid and reads Exit full page, in the same spot it was before, and Esc brings you back too.
Sharing
Every report prints cleanly and downloads as PDF, Excel or CSV. The numbers in the export are real numbers, so columns still add up in a spreadsheet.