Now you've set up the essentials, you're ready to start using Accounting Start to its full potential.

One of the key goals for any business is to make sure you're making enough money to cover your purchases and other costs and have some leftovers!

Good record-keeping is essential and now you're using Accounting Start, you'll be able to track your income and expenses with ease.

Here you'll find a quick guide to some of the key reports and tools available In Accounting Start that help you keep track of your cash flow and business performance.

In this section we're going to cover:

• Using the Summary page to get a quick view of your business operations
• Finding your way around the key reports - what they're for and when to use them

Summary page

The Summary page opens after you sign in to Accounting Start. You can return to this page anytime by clicking Summary on the main navigation bar.

Cashflow and invoices

The first row of tiles on the Summary page shows the cashflow of your business. The tiles show how much you've been paid and how much you've paid out as well as your overall balance. Click a tile to view the transactions that make up the total. You can also click Add on the Money In or Money Out tiles to quickly create new transactions.

The second row of the Summary page shows details about your invoices. The first tile provides a graph of current and overdue invoices. Click a section of the graph to show the invoices for that status. The second tile show all of your outstanding invoices, while the last tile shows your overdue invoice by the customer.

Banking

The bottom row on the Summary page shows the current balance of each bank account. You can click any of the tiles to view the transactions that make up the balance.

Key reports

Besides the cash flow reports, Accounting Start can help you look at many aspects of your financial performance. We'll look at one very important report in this section but check out Management reports for details on the others.

Profit and Loss

The Profit and Loss report shows the performance of your business over a specified period. It shows the value for sales, direct expenses including cost of sales, and overheads in the given period. It also shows the resulting gross and net profit or loss. When running the report, you can drill down on the values to see what transactions are included.

See The Profit and Loss report to learn more.

Cash flow

Introduction to the Profit and Loss