Financial statement reports
The Balance Sheet, Income Statement, and Trial Balance built from posted journals by account class.
Three reports read the same posted general ledger and present it three ways. The Balance Sheet shows what the company owns and owes as of a date; the Income Statement shows revenue minus expense over a period; the Trial Balance lists every posting account with its debit or credit balance. All three come from the same balance engine, so they tie out to each other by construction.
They live under Accounting and each require the accounting view permission. Like everything financial, they only show data once accounting enabled is on — see Accounting & the ledger for that switch. With it off, journals are never written and every balance reads zero.
The three statements
The split isn't three data sources. The Balance Sheet and Trial Balance are the same account set at a cutoff; the Income Statement is the movement across a window. Every account carries an incomeBalance marker of either "Balance Sheet" or "Income Statement", set when the account is created, that decides which statement it appears on. Asset, Liability, and Equity accounts are Balance Sheet; Revenue and Expense are Income Statement.
Balances always exclude Draft journals. Only posted (and reversed) entries move a report, so an unposted entry sitting in the Journal Entries list has no effect on any statement until it posts. This is why the account ledger, the reports, and the period-close snapshots all agree.
How a balance is built
Every report starts from a single balance function that reads the posted ledger and returns three numbers per account:
Group (heading) accounts don't hold postings; their totals roll up from their children. Because a debit and a credit are stored with opposite signs, the roll-up is sign-aware by account class. Asset and Revenue accounts add to their parent; Liability, Equity, and Expense subtract. That single rule makes the accounting identities fall out cleanly: a Balance Sheet root nets Assets minus Liabilities minus Equity to roughly zero, and the Income Statement root is Revenue minus Expense, which is net income.
Net Income is computed, never posted
Undistributed profit lives in the Revenue and Expense accounts until a period close moves it. A Balance Sheet drawn at any date would otherwise be out of balance, because that profit belongs in equity. Carbon closes the gap by summing every Income Statement leaf account (Revenue minus Expense, with the same sign rule) and surfacing it as a single "Net Income" line inside the Equity group. It is a calculated row, not a real account you can post to. Don't create a "Net Income" account in the chart of accounts.
Period and date selection
Each report has a period picker at the top, but they don't pick the same thing:
- The Balance Sheet is as-of: you choose an end date only (presets like "Today", "End of Last Month", "End of Last Quarter", "End of Last Fiscal Year", or a custom "As of" date). There is no start date, because the sheet is a cumulative snapshot.
- The Income Statement and Trial Balance are range: you choose a start and end date (presets like "This Month", "Last Quarter", "This Fiscal Year", "Fiscal Year to Date", "All Time", or a custom range). Fiscal presets follow the company's fiscal start month from fiscal year settings.
These pickers slice by posting date, not by the accounting period a journal landed in, so a report window can span open and closed periods freely. Closing a period doesn't change what a report shows; it just snapshots balances so the reads stay fast.
Alongside the date picker, a company selector lets you view a single company or roll several together (multi-company consolidation, with currency translation when a "Show translated" toggle is on), and an account search filters the tree by name or number.
What the reports do not slice
There is one gap worth stating plainly, because it's easy to assume otherwise.
Core statements are not sliced by reporting dimension
Journal lines can carry (location, department, cost center, and custom axes), but the Balance Sheet, Income Statement, and Trial Balance do not offer a dimension filter. They aggregate every posting on an account regardless of its dimension tags. To analyze the ledger by dimension, use the dimensions tooling, not these three statements.
The account ledger drawer (the drill-down you get by clicking an account on any of these reports) lists that account's individual posted lines for the same window, so a report figure always traces back to the transactions that make it up.
Related
The journal, accounts, and the accounting-enabled switch these reports read from.
The tag axes the core statements do not slice by, and where to analyze them instead.
Fiscal periods, the balance snapshots that keep reports fast, and fiscal-year settings.