Understanding the financial activity of your company sets the foundation for identifying good business opportunities and making the right decisions to ensure future growth.
By tracking, organizing, and analyzing financial performances, you will have a clearer picture of where the money is going and where it’s coming from.
To stay on top of numbers, companies use financial reports.
Financial reports are official company documents that showcase all the financial activities and performances of your business over a specific period. Usually, they are created on a quarterly or yearly basis.
Every business is legally obliged to use financial reporting to display its current financial status and organize financial data.
Implementing detailed financial analysis and using developed data models can help any business better evaluate current activities and make future business growth decisions.
You will be able to recognize trends, potential problems, and stay on top of your financial performances in real-time. This sets the foundation for quick and accurate economic decisions.
Compliance
这main purpose of financial reports is to make sure your business is in compliance with the law and regulations of government agencies.
Regulatory institutions examine every document that evaluates the financial activities of your company. This is why making accurate financial documentation is crucial for the well-being of your business.
Aside from accuracy, you will also have to follow certain deadlines that these institutions set. This sometimes causes pressure in accounting departments to create complex financial reports quickly and accurately, which is why regular bookkeeping is immensely important.
In the US, private and public companies have to be compliant with the GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles), while international companies mostly report under the IRFS (International Reporting Financial Standards).
这两个组织都提供了一些标准指南，但是在创建财务报表时，您需要注意一些差异。
Simplify你的taxes
No matter how big or small your business is, doing taxes can be a stressful task.
A balance sheet is a financial statement that tracks the total amount of assets, liabilities, and shareholder equities within your company. They also provide you with a real-time evaluation of asset liquidity and debt coverage.
Most companies create balance sheets on a quarterly basis and include the data from each quarter in the annual report.
创建资产负债表时,有一个资产page (includes available cash, equipment value, inventory value, etc.) and a liability page (includes accounts payable, credit card balances, bank loans, etc.) that you need to fulfill.
一旦这些资产和负债总计，您将从资产中减去负债。您得到的金额就是所谓的“所有者权益”。
Cash Flow Statement
这是一个金融statement that records all the different cash flow activities in the company.
Stakeholder equity statement includes these key components:
股息和损失后，保留收入已被减去
Common/preferred stock sales
Purchased treasury stock
Generated income (including the income that comes from unrealized capital gains)
Pro Tip: How to Stay on Top of the Financial Health of Your Business
Do you own and manage a small business? Then you know how much of a struggle it can be to stay on top of the financial health of your business on a daily basis. Now you can pull data from QuickBooks and HubSpot’s CRM to track your key business metrics in one convenient dashboard, including:
按管道阶段进行公开交易和交易金额。Get sales data directly from your HubSpot CRM and track deals, deal amounts, deal stages, and dates from your sales pipeline.
Key financial data.Track gross profit margin, open invoices by amount and by customer, paid invoices, expenses, and income from QuickBooks.
Financial reports help you understand your company’s financial performance, attract potential investors, and are legally required. This is why you have to make sure that they are as accurate as possible.
You want your financial reports to be comprehensive, understandable, and precise.
Even though creating a good financial report can be very complex, we are going to show you a step-by-step guide that will make the whole process much easier.
Follow these steps to create a great financial report:
When making a sales forecast, the first thing you should do is create a spreadsheet that includes your sales performance from the last three years.
Use a specific section for each line of sales and organize columns for each month of year one. For years two and three, organize columns on a quarterly basis.
Create three different blocks – one for pricing, one for unit sales, and the third one for multiplying units by unit cost (to calculate the cost of sales).
Cost of sales is important because it helps you calculate a precise gross margin.
一旦完成数学，您就可以进行准确的销售预测，并得到历史财务数据的支持。
专家提示：If you are using HubSpot CRM to visualize your sales data, watch the video below to learn how to set up and track your HubSpot CRM data in order to moreaccurately forecast your sales本月，季度及以后。
Step 2 – Create a Budget for Expenses
Once you have made a sales forecast, you will want to calculate how much it will cost you.
For taxes, you can multiply the estimated debt balance by your estimated tax percentage rate.
To estimate interest, multiply your estimated debt balance by an estimated interest rate.
Step 3 – Create a Cash Flow Statement
We already mentioned what cash flow statements are and why they are so important for your business. They are typically created based on the sales forecast, balance sheet components, and other estimates.
You can calculate the net profit by subtracting expenses, interests, and taxes from thegross margin。
This step is extremely important since it serves as a profit and loss statement that helps you create a detailed business forecast for the next three years.
步骤5 - 管理资产和负债
为了估计您的业务net worthat the end of a fiscal year, you have to be able to manage assets and liabilities that won’t be shown in the profits and loss statement.
Come up with a rough estimate of how much money you expect to have on hand each month and include accounts receivable, inventory, land, and equipment.
After that, calculate liabilities, debts from outstanding loans, and accounts payable.
Step 6 – Find the Breakeven Point
You know that you have found a breakeven point if yourbusiness expensesare in line with the sales volume.
三年的收入估计应该帮助你cquire this analysis. In viable businesses, the total revenue should exceed total expenses.
For potential investors, this kind of information is crucial since they want to be reassured that they are investing in a company with steady growth.
财务报告示例
Nowadays, most companies use different tools and templates to make their reporting process easier. Using dashboards can help you track the metrics you obtain from the financial management tools that your business integrates.
With our comprehensive dashboards, you can follow the most significant numbers and later include them in your financial report, making the whole process less time-consuming.
We understand that each business is different, which is why you can also customize the reports in any way you deem fit and at any time.
Here are some of our most popular financial reports that you can try out:
Once the time comes for creating a financial report, you can simply integrate the data you gathered in this dashboard.
它包括的关键指标是净利润，按月按月，每月支出，损失，毛利润和其他收入。
盈利能力概述仪表板示例
条纹（MRR和Churn）仪表板
Use theStripe Dashboardto monitor your churn rate and track MRR growth in real-time. Also, you can check how many customers your business currently has at any given time.
Once you connect your Stripe account to this template, you will be able to answer these questions:
How much money did I make through sales today?
How can I track my MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue)?
How many active customers do we have?
我因搅动客户而损失了多少收入？
Some of the metrics you can visualize are churn rate goal, customer churn rate, gross volume, revenue churn, and customers.
MRR和Churn仪表板示例
Profitwell Revenue Trends Dashboard
Profitwell Revenue Trends Dashboardallows you to monitor all the incoming sources of revenue for your SaaS business and keep track of the important churn metrics.
Also, you can compare revenue from upgrades and downgrades and investigate your churn ratio revenue.
Revenue Trends Dashboard Example
PayPal (Account Overview) Dashboard
这贝宝帐户概述仪表板is extremely useful for bigger companies who want to have a clear overview of their payments, refunds, sales, and other key metrics that your business relies on.
可以在几分钟之内将PayPal帐户连接到模板，您将获得以下问题的答案：
How can I track gross sales?
计算净销售额的最佳方法是什么？
上个月我花了多少钱？
How can I check my PayPal account balance?
How much money was returned through refunds last month?
PayPal Dashboard Example
Improve Financial Reporting with Databox
由于您创建的财务报告将由政府机构和潜在投资者进行检查，因此您将需要确保它们是一流的。
However, the reporting process can sometimes feel a bit overwhelming and you will face a lot of pressure trying to create the perfect report.
Databox can help relieve this stress and enhance your financial reporting skills.
With our customizable dashboards, you can visualize all the most important data and gather it in one place. Aside from being visually pleasing, your reports will also be much more engaging and minimize any chances of error since the information will be imported directly from your financial management tools.
为了满足您公司的主要利益相关者和潜在合作伙伴，您可以sign up here免费试用并立即改进您的财务报告。
About the author
Filip StojanovicFilip Stojanovic是一位学习商业和政治科学的内容作家。另外，我是一个巨大的网球爱好者。尽管我的梦想是赢得大满贯，但作为内容作家的工作也很有趣。
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