Last reviewed: 2026-07-30

Reporting

Purpose

Reporting explains company results from posted ledger truth and preserves the exact formal snapshots used for close, review, and later reference.

Canonical rules

Formal reports derive only from same-company posted journal-entry lines.
Drafts, workflow records, imports, checks, waivers, operational facts, and report-pack records may support review but are not formal report truth.
The launch standard reports are trial balance, balance sheet, and income statement.
A live report is a current calculation. A persisted ReportRun is an immutable captured result with its definition, parameters, attribution, input fingerprint, snapshot payload, and source-line references.
Posted reversals and adjustments are separate ledger entries. Reports include them by their own posting dates and never rewrite their targets.
Report classification uses durable account type. Account codes, names, number ranges, screen order, provider vocabulary, and workflow labels do not determine financial-statement meaning.
Live reports use current account code and name. Persisted snapshots preserve the code, name, type, and normal balance reviewed at capture without changing the underlying account or journal history.
Historical inactive and retired accounts remain reportable when posted lines reference their immutable account ids.
Initial-release formal statements use only the company's base or reporting currency and retain accounting precision without hidden report-level rounding.
Reporting does not post, correct, close, reopen, or store source evidence.
Sales-tax control records and facilitator-remitted support may be shown only as separately labeled drilldown support. Formal amounts continue to come solely from posted seller-liability and remittance journal-entry lines.

Standard statement meaning

The trial balance covers an inclusive start and end date. It shows posted debit and credit activity and the net debit or credit balance for each account in that range.
The balance sheet is cumulative through an inclusive as-of date. Assets use debit less credit; liabilities and equity use credit less debit.
Until explicit closing entries transfer temporary-account balances, the balance sheet shows one derived cumulative unclosed-earnings line equal to income credits less debits, minus expense debits less credits, through the as-of date. This line is a report subtotal, not an account or ledger entry.
The income statement covers an inclusive start and end date. Income uses credits less debits, expenses use debits less credits, and net income is total income less total expenses.
Negative balances remain visible. Normal balance helps explain an unusual balance but does not reverse the account-type formula.
Account code may order accounts within a report section for recognition; it must not classify them.

The launch statements use the major sections supported by canonical account type. Detailed revenue, cost-of-sales, operating-expense, current/noncurrent, or other configurable presentation groups require later accepted truth.

Live and captured results

A live result states its definition version, company, parameters, generated time, currency, availability, issues, and ledger-input fingerprint.
Empty ledger activity may produce an available zero report.
Missing accounts, wrong-company references, unsupported currencies, malformed parameters, incomplete source identity, or failed report equations produce visible unavailable results rather than partial formal statements.
An unavailable result cannot be captured as a ReportRun.
A captured run remains immutable and reviewable after ledger, account, or report-definition changes. Currentness is recomputed; it is never written back as if the historical snapshot changed.

Close and downstream use

Reporting owns report definitions, execution, snapshots, currentness, and drilldown.
Close stores only the exact ReportRun reference in its report pack and validates it through the Reporting-owned resolver.
The launch Close trial-balance run must be persisted, current, same-company, and parameterized to the exact target financial-period boundaries.
A later posting, correction, account classification change, or report definition change may make an earlier run noncurrent without deleting it.
Formal report drilldown resolves captured report lines to captured journal-entry and journal-line references. Current workflow state may be shown separately as support but cannot redefine the snapshot.

Security, recovery, and customer control

Viewing a formal live or persisted report requires company-scoped report.view authorization.
Capturing a ReportRun requires company-scoped report_run.capture authorization.
Successful, denied, and failed protected Reporting attempts preserve the audit context required by the Reporting Contract.
ReportRun identity, numbers, snapshots, audit links, and source references are company backup, restore, export, and recovery data.
Rendering, printing, and file export are presentation or export behavior. Export remains subject to the separate protected company-data export boundary.

Explicitly deferred

cash-flow statements;
comparative columns, budgets, forecasts, eliminations, and consolidation;
foreign-currency translation and exchange-rate presentation;
prior-period-adjustment and retrospective-restatement presentation;
configurable statement builders and customer-authored grouping formulas;
detailed account subgroups beyond canonical launch account types;
automated closing entries;
tax-basis or regulatory-basis financial statements;
rendering, printing, spreadsheet/PDF generation, and UI implementation; and
provider-specific report definitions.

../contracts/reporting.contract.md
../contracts/trial-balance.contract.md
../contracts/account.contract.md
../contracts/journal-entry.contract.md
../contracts/accounting-correction.contract.md
../contracts/close-run.contract.md
../contracts/security/role-permission-contract.md
../contracts/security/audit-event-contract.md
../contracts/sales-tax-accounting-and-remittance.contract.md