The balance sheet is one of the most powerful tools in accounting, allowing owners to gauge how much debt and risk their businesses are carrying and helping them make better decisions about their business‘ future. For a more in-depth introduction to the balance sheet, check out the article here in Ambrook Education. You can also read our primer on reading a balance sheet here.

The Balance Sheet is split out into sections based account types: Assets, Liabilities, and Equities. Within each one of those groups there are subtypes, for example the Assets section contains Current Assets and Long Term Assets. If you click onto the name of any account you can see its details and change its type if you want to change how it is grouped.

Clicking on any value will give you a detailed view of underlying transactions. From there you can see what types of transactions (invoices, journal entries, etc) on what dates are contributing to your account balance total. You will also see what category tag the transactions are applied to. You can click into the details page of any transaction from this view and change the way a transaction is tagged. This will update the way a transaction is reflected in your P&L but will not remove the transaction from the account.

The balance sheet is broken out into columns by month across the date range you selected. Each number across a row represents the balance of an account at the end of the month. For the last month in your date range, if you selected a partial month (such as December 15th), the number in the December column would be your balance at the end of your date range - not the month.