Balance Sheet

The Balance Sheet displays the distribution of your firm’s assets, liabilities, and net worth as of the current date. The report also includes totals for assets, liabilities, net worth, and liabilities + net worth. Total assets should equal total liabilities plus net worth. If these totals do not agree, Vision displays the amount of the discrepancy at the end of the report.

Configuration Settings

You can only generate the cash-basis version of this report if the Enable Cash-Basis Reporting option is selected in Configuration.

The Organization Record Access setting for your role on the Roles form (Configuration > Security > Roles) determines the organizations for which you can see data on this report.

Organizations and Separate Balance Sheets

If you use organizations in Vision, use the Maintain separate balance sheets by Organization option on the Organization General Setup form to specify whether or not you want to maintain the data needed to generate a separate Balance Sheet for each organization. (Vision does not provide a similar option for the Income Statement. Vision automatically tracks the data required to generate a separate Income Statement for each organization.)

You have the following choices:

• If you do not want to maintain separate Balance Sheets, you specify a default organization on the Organization General Setup form. Vision assigns all explicit and implicit postings to balance sheet accounts to this default organization. You do not need to enter a project number when you enter a transaction that affects a Balance Sheet account. When you generate a Balance Sheet, Vision generates the report for the company as a whole, using the data for the default organization.
• If you do want to maintain separate Balance Sheets, you enter a project number for every transaction that affects the balance sheet accounts. Vision uses the project number to determine which organization receives the posted transaction. The result is that Vision tracks transactions affecting balance sheet accounts by organization. Because of that, you can generate Balance Sheets for individual organizations, or you can generate a Balance Sheet for the company as a whole.

Link Bank Codes and Liability Codes to Organizations

To maintain separate Balance Sheets, you must also link each of your bank codes (Configuration > Accounting > Banks) and each of your accounts payable liability codes (Configuration > Accounting > Company AP) to a specific organization.

Account Groups

You can use account groups to organize accounts on financial reports.

Increase Performance with the Use Summary Table Option

Because of the calculations involved, it may take longer to generate this report than it does for most other reports. This is particularly true for large databases.

To get the best performance, do the following before you generate a Balance Sheet:

• Run the Refresh GL Summary Table utility.
• Select the Use Summary Table option on the General tab in the Options dialog box for the report.

Recommendation: The Refresh GL Summary Table utility calculates and stores the financial data needed for this report in a summary table. We recommend that you schedule the Refresh GL Summary Table utility to run after business hours each night, so that financial reports printed the next day show current data as of close of business the day before.

Multicompany

You can generate a consolidated Balance Sheet for multiple companies. To generate that report, go to Reporting > Consolidated GL

If you are using the Multicompany feature, you must maintain separate balance sheets (see above). This is necessary so that you can identify the company that "owns" an account when you enter a balance sheet transaction for an account available to more than one company.

If the report includes intercompany accounts receivable or intercompany accounts payable accounts, you can drill down from the account description column in those rows to see supporting detail in the Intercompany Billing Detail report. (This drill-down option is only available if your role security gives you access to the Intercompany Billing Detail report. It is not available from report rows for tax-related journal entries.)

When you drill down from an intercompany accounts receivable account, you see complete detail for the supporting intercompany transactions. When you drill down from an intercompany accounts payable account, you do not see the Originating Company Cost Amount and Originating Company Journal Entry Amount columns.

If the report includes rows for accounts that belong to companies other than the active company, the same drill-down option is available from those rows.

Multicurrency

If you use the Multicurrency feature, the report may display amounts in different currencies. If the report contains a total for amounts in a mix of currencies, the report displays #### instead of an amount.

If the report displays amounts in different currencies, it is suggested that you also include currency symbols or currency codes. To do that, click the Layout tab in the Options dialog box and click in Currency to open the Format Currency dialog box. You may want to use the currency code in place of the currency symbol when the report includes more than one currency with the same currency symbol. For example, U.S. dollars and Canadian dollars both use $ as the currency symbol. If you use the code, the report displays USD and CAD instead of the symbol.

An alternative to mixing currencies on the report is to select a presentation currency. When you generate the report, Vision converts all amounts to the presentation currency. The advantage of this method is that you can make meaningful comparisons between amounts, and the report can display meaningful totals.

Options Dialog Box

Use the Options dialog box to specify reporting options for a report. Depending on the report, the dialog box contains one or more of the following tabs: General, Sorting/Grouping, Columns, Budget, Metrics, User Defined Sections, Activity, Drill Down, Layout, and Graph.