Trial Balance to eliminate current year profit

Please forgive my topic title follow my explanations below

I use a software called Draftworx (issue is the same with Caseware) to prepare Annual Financial Statements for my clients. I export my TB into excel from manager and prepare it for import into Draftworx.

The volume of my client previously was less so I never felt the impact of have to fix my retained earnings before import.

When running a TB on manager, the system adds current year profit to retained earnings so I have to manually subtract the current profit/loss before importing. The reason why I do this is because the draftting software will calculate the profit/loss and adds it to retained earnings. Further to that it does not import net profit line item since it is a calculated figure.

I am proposing that on the TB report its either the report will:

Option 1
Add another line item under equity as Net profit/loss reflecting current year profit/loss and then retained earnings will then exclude current year profit (row 52 and 53 image below)

re-sol-01

Option 2
Remove the Net profit line item from the TB report and then Retained earnings total will sum to 35 955.84

excl-net-profit

excl-net-profit-re

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I am wondering why you present trial balances to your clients at all. I think of trial balances as antiquated relics of manual accounting systems that used to be tools for accountants to verify debits and credits matched before preparing the actual financial statements. They hardly seem necessary with modern, computer-based systems. Why not provide your clients their balance sheets, profit and loss statements, statements of changes in equity, and cash flow statements?

Thank you for your response.

I do not give my client the Trial Balance but I use it to prepare annual financial statements. Legislation required that the Annual Financial Statements be prepared in accordance with IFRS for SME or full IFRS depending on the size of the entity.

To ensure that these statements are compliant its much easier to use a drafting software since their financial statements templates are always updated with the new changes.

It seems questionable to modify a Manager report format to meet the input format of a completely independent software application. What happens when that software’s input format changes? And what about all the competing applications that might have different formats?

Most accounting softwares that I have used, one can extract a trial balance with current year profit excluded from retained earnings.

It is presented in either formats that I have suggested.

Fortunately the 2 widely used drafting softwares (Draftworx and Caseware) use the same format and it is highly unlikely that they will change any time soon.

Imo it would be optimal if Managers custom report facility was enhanced to support data transfer to a variety of other software applications including Draftworx or Caseware. That way Manager would have a general solution rather than just an interface to Draftworx.

@Panashe_Mlambo My approach with Draftworx is to leave the Net profit line in the TB and import it into Draftworx, then map the Net profit value to Retained Earnings as well. You don’t have to manually add / subtract the two values, let Draftworx do the calculation (you can map both Retained Earnings and Net profit / Loss to Retained Earnings).

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True, and as a first pass (which would cover most drafting software solutions) to simply have a generic CSV export function of the TB.

Hardly necessary. Copy the report to the clipboard, paste into a spreadsheet, manipulate to your heart’s content, and save it as CSV. Then you can do whatever you want with it.

I agree, also, I would rather have access to transactional / report data in general via the API than making changes to the TB.

I will try this method.

I agree with you here. Time spend on preparing data to ready for import into a drafting software it will be significantly reduced

This Copy to clipboard method is terrible when copying reports. Data that should be in different columns end up in one column now you have to spend time splitting it. The issue is on another topic linked below.

That is only because the information started out on the report in one column. That’s a separate design issue, not a performance issue.

I have tested it. It working well, thank you.

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Does that mean we can take this topic out of the ideas category?

I think this is the issue now but can be addressed on the other topic below.