Welcome to the Fit Small Business Xero training course. In this lesson we're
going to cover how to create a balance sheet report in Xero. To follow along
with me, log in to your Xero account now or click the link below this video for a
free 30-day trial of Xero. You can also click this link to access our full Xero
course and other helpful resources. Let's get started. The balance sheet report
shows the assets, liabilities, and owner's equity of your business as of a point in time.
For example, as of December 31st 2016. The balance sheet report provides
you with the net worth of your company which in other words shows what your
business owns, known as assets, versus what you owe to others, known as
liabilities. Depending on the results of this report you may be able to attract
potential investors or secure a business loan from your bank or financial
institution. Similar to the income statement which we discussed in the
previous lesson, your balance sheet will only be as accurate as the information
you have entered into Xero. Therefore you must do a good job of entering all
invoices, bills, credit notes, and banking transactions into Xero in a timely
manner. We recommend at least monthly if not more often. Click the links below to
access our lessons on invoices, bills, credit notes and banking transactions.
By staying on top of entering all of your business transactions, you will always
have an up-to-date balance sheet report that you can review monthly and provide
to potential investors. Reviewing your balance sheet on a monthly basis has the
following advantages: you'll be able to identify assets, liabilities or equity
transactions that have been categorized to the wrong account, you'll be able to
catch missing assets or liabilities which could cause inaccurate financial
statements, and you'll be able to take proactive steps to improve your overall
net worth. To create a balance sheet report in Xero, from the Xero dashboard
you want to click on reports and then select all reports. The balance sheet
report is located in the financial section. As you can see here there are
two balance sheet reports. Xero has redesigned several reports and the
balance sheet is one of those reports. For the purposes of this lesson we will
discuss the new balance sheet report which has a new button to the right of
it here. You can easily add a report to your favorites by clicking the star to
the left of the name of the report. So as you can see right now the old balance
sheet report was a favorite report. So what we'll do is we'll click that star
to remove that from the favorites list and we'll actually add our new balance
sheet report to the favorites list. Now when you add a report to the favorites
list what that does is when we go back up to the reports menu, instead of
clicking on all reports we'll be able to go directly to the report that we'd like
to run. And so we'll be able to go down to our balance sheet report and run it
directly from there. Let's go ahead and run our report. In the next screen
we'll go ahead and select the date range that we'd like to run the report for.
So from the drop down here you can actually select one of the preset dates here from
the list, or you can click custom and then select a different date that you'd
like to use. Be sure to click the update button to
refresh the report. So here is a sample balance sheet report for our fictitious
company Acme Web Pros Plus. The balance sheet report can be exported to a PDF,
Excel, or Google sheets. Just click the export button and then make your
selections here. You can also save a report as a draft, published, or custom.
The draft option allows you to create a balance sheet report that you or someone
else can make changes to later on. You might create several draft balance sheet
reports before you are ready to publish them. The published option is used to
save reports when you are finalizing the books for the month or the year.
A published report will not change if for some reason the information in the
system has changed or updated in some way. You can only publish reports if you have
the advisor user role. Click here to access this lesson. And finally a custom
report: you want to use this option to save the format of the balance sheet
report so that you don't have to recreate it each time you run the report.
Xero will ask you if you would like to make this template your default. We'll show
you how to save a custom report format in the next section. Similar to the
income statement there are three primary ways you can make changes to the balance
sheet report. You can change the report title, you can change the report settings,
or you could change the layout and format of the report. You can change the
title of most reports in Xero. To do this, just hover your mouse near
the title of the report and to the right you'll see a link that says edit title.
If you click that link it opens up that box will give you the option to edit the
report title as you choose to. The options available in the report settings
will depend on the type of report that you are running. The report settings
option for every report in Xero will always be located to the right of the
date range section. Let's take a look at the report settings options that we have
available for our balance sheet report. So the options that we have here are the
ability to compare our report to previous periods. So for example if we
run this report and we say we want it as of the end of last month. And if we chose
to do this as of the previous period then what will happen is we'll have a
report that shows the column as of the end of last month, June 30th 2017. And it
will also have another column that shows us the previous period, which would be
the end of May. Accounting basis: in general most businesses use the cash
method of accounting. However Xero allows you to use either
method, accrual or cash, to run your reports.
Please note the default reports are run using the accrual method of accounting. If you
prefer not to have decimals shown on your report, you can go ahead and remove
this check mark here that says show decimals. And then finally tracking
categories: if you have set up tracking categories in Xero, then you can filter
this report to show all tracking categories that you have set up or just
certain ones. Click the link below to learn more about how tracking categories work.
So in this example we currently have all tracking categories selected.
We could remove all and just select specific ones if that's what we'd like
to do for this report. And then once you've made all the changes to your
report you want to be sure and click the update button so that the data on the
report will refresh. The edit layout designer tool allows you to customize
your reports as follows: it gives you the ability to add rows or columns to track
totals or notes, it allows you to revise account groupings, you can rearrange rows
and columns by dragging and dropping them, and you can change formulas.
So Acme Web Pros Plus would like to add a footer to the bottom of their balance
sheet report. So let's go ahead and walk through the steps to add a footer to
this report, and then we'll save the report as a custom report so that it
will include the footer each time we run our balance sheet report. At the bottom
of the report you'll see a button that says edit layout. Go ahead and click
that button to launch the edit layout designer. So here is our edit layout
designer template. At the very top we've got the toolbar so you can use a toolbar
to format text, add a schedule to the report, add a footer to the report, add a
row, or add a column. So we wanted to go ahead and add a footer to this report.
So we'll click the footer icon here, which takes us to the very bottom of the
report where we can actually type in the footer.
After we've typed our footer information here we can actually format it.
Over to the right we've got an option to bold it, we can italicize it, and we
can even highlight the text. Once you are satisfied with the footer information
you want to go ahead and click the done button over here to the right. And then
we will go back to our report and our new footer should be here. And here it is.
And so now we want to go ahead and make this our default balance sheet report,
which means that each time we come in to run the balance sheet report, it will go
ahead and provide us a comparison to the previous period that we're running our
report for. And it will also show us this footer at the bottom of the report
automatically. Then we want to save this report as a custom report. So to say this
report is a custom report you should name it so that you know it's your
custom report and not the default report in Xero. So make some type of notation to
the report name. This won't show up anywhere this is just so that you know
this is your report. And then you can also make this report your default.
So that as I mentioned each time you come in to run this balance sheet report,
it will be the default balance sheet report that will run. And so we'll click our
save button to make that change, and that's it. So that wraps up the lesson on
how to create a balance sheet report in Xero.
To access our full Xero course or any of the other lessons in this series,
click this link. You can also find a link below this video for a free 30-day trial of Xero.
If you have feedback about this course
or if you have any questions, please leave a comment below.
Also don't forget to subscribe.