Reports & frozen figures

Every report in the accounting app is computed from your posted ledger for the date range and legal entity you choose — there is no separate reporting database to rebuild and nothing to "refresh".

The reports

Open Reports and pick a tab:

• Profit & Loss and P&L by Month
• Balance Sheet and Cash Flow
• VAT Report — see VAT
• Statutory accounts — choose the format (auto, Small company (Format 1), or Micro-entity (FRS 105)), for the whole legal entity or broken out per income source and property
• Trial balance
• Aged AR and Aged AP — each line shown in the currency your customer or supplier owes it in, alongside your own
• Statements, Dynamic, Analyst, Saved reports
• Restatements — see Corrections & audit history
• Bad debt

Seeing a report as it stood

Corrections, reversals and restatements all keep their history, which means a report can be run not just "as at" a date, but "as we knew it" at a past moment.

On the Trial balance and Statutory accounts tabs, set As recorded at to a date and time to see the report exactly as it read then. Press Live to return to today's figures. The Restatements tab links straight into this: each restatement offers As originally reported next to As restated.

Frozen historical reports

At the points where figures become official — a year-end close, for example — ac-co.ai keeps the rendered report exactly as it stood, and later re-proves that it still renders the same way. That is what makes a historical figure trustworthy rather than merely stored.

What is re-proved is deliberately the part that is money: the accounts and entities involved and the raw ledger totals behind each line. Wording is not:

• Renaming an account, changing its code, or re-labelling a report line does not break a frozen report. Master data is allowed to improve. The stored print keeps the wording that was used at the time, so a reprint still looks like the original.
• Any change to the underlying figures is detected. No rename, re-heading or re-ordering can move a verified number, because none of those things is part of what gets verified. If a frozen report stops matching, something moved that should not have.

Corrections are handled the same way everywhere: a transaction and the entry that reverses it net to zero, so a correction never leaves a one-sided residue in a report or a control account.

Account types and normal balances

You do not choose whether an account is a debit or a credit account. Its normal balance follows from its type and subtype — assets and expenses are debit accounts, liabilities, equity and income are credit accounts, and contra accounts such as accumulated depreciation and doubtful-debt provisions are handled the other way round. Because the trial balance signs every balance with it, this is not free-text master data: if the classification looks wrong, change the account's type or subtype and the normal balance follows.

Renaming an account is always safe. Re-classifying one is not always just a rename: if the account carries posted entries inside a period whose report has already been frozen, changing its type, subtype or statutory heading would move money between statutory lines — that is, it would mean the figures already reported were misstated. ac-co.ai refuses that as a master-data edit and asks you to record it as a restatement instead, so the original report and the corrected one stand side by side. See Corrections & audit history.