Financial Reports Builder: P&L and Balance Sheet

A line is a handful of account codes

Accounting › Reporting › Report Builder › Financial Reports.

Each line names accounts the way people say them out loud:

An exclusion beats the prefix that let the account in, so the last one means what it looks like it means. Matching happens against the account code, which is the point: an account somebody opens next April lands on the right line by itself, without anybody remembering to come back here.

…or a handful of account types

Every chart of accounts in the world numbers its accounts differently. They all carry the same Odoo account types. A line of kind Accounts by type takes income, income_other and reads the same on a French chart, a US chart and a Vietnamese one.

A trailing star takes the family: expense* is every expense type this version has — and every expense type a later version adds. 19.0 added expense_other; a report written on expense* in 16.0 picks it up without being touched.

The two reports installed with the module are built this way, so they show real figures on the first run whatever chart you are on.

Formulas, over lines and nothing else

Give a line a code — GROSS, OPEX — and write arithmetic on the next one:

REVENUE - COGS
GROSS - TOTOPEX

A formula may name a line further down; the run resolves in passes. What it may not do is reach anything except those figures. The namespace it evaluates in holds floats and nothing else — no record, no environment, no cursor.

That restraint is deliberate and worth stating plainly: Odoo's safe_eval restricts bytecode and dunder names, but it does not wrap the objects handed to it. A live recordset in that namespace is read and write access to the whole database for anybody who can edit a report line — and a report definition is exactly the kind of thing people export and email to each other.

A formula that names a code no line has, or two lines that name each other in a circle, stop the run with an error. They do not print 0.00. Of the three possible answers that is the worst one, because it looks like a figure.

Branches count

A branch is not another company — it posts under its own company_id while sharing its parent's chart of accounts, and Odoo installs no chart for it at all. (Branch accounting arrived with 17.0; on 16.0 an entry like that is refused by Odoo itself.) A statement for the parent counts what its branches posted, and a statement written for a branch finds the chart it actually posts on. Filtering on equality instead would make a group report short by exactly the branch, with nothing on the page to say so.

It tells you what it left out

This is the failure mode of every hand-built statement, and the reason they are quietly distrusted: somebody opens account 6035, it falls in nobody's prefix, and the report still foots — because the totals are formulas over the lines that do exist.

Every run checks which accounts moved in the period and landed on no line, and says so at the top, with a button straight to the entries. An account on no line is a five-second fix once you know about it and a wrong board pack for a year if you don't.

The check stays inside the statement's own subject. A profit and loss is not supposed to have the bank account on it, so it is not told about it — told instead that four hundred accounts are unaccounted for, people stop reading the warning inside a week, and then the day account 6035 really does fall outside every prefix nobody sees it. The scope is taken from the account groups the report's own lines reach.

A period, or a position

A profit and loss covers a period: the figures run from the start date to the end date. A balance sheet is a position: it is everything the company holds as at the end date, opening balance and all. A report says which it is, and the run obeys it — a position ignores the start date entirely.

This is the one mistake in this trade that nobody catches by looking. A balance sheet run as a period shows the movement of the year under a title that says balance sheet: the bank line is the year's net cash flow, the capital line is empty in every year but the first, and every figure on it is wrong in a way that reads perfectly. The balance sheet shipped with the module is set to position.

The comparison column follows the same rule: on a position it means the position a year ago, not what moved during last year.

It can tell you it does not balance

The last line of the example balance sheet is Out of balance (must be zero), and the result above it is worked out from the income and expense accounts themselves.

That is a deliberate choice against the easy one. A "result for the period" computed as assets less liabilities less equity is not a result — it is whatever makes the two sides meet. A balance sheet built that way cannot come out wrong, which means it cannot come out right either: the day somebody lays their sheet out on their own prefixes and forgets 47, seven thousand in suspense disappears into the plug and the statement still foots. Worked out honestly, the last line is non-zero and somebody goes and looks.

Compare, drill, print

• Comparison against the period before or the same period last year — or, on a position, against the position then. A whole number of months is shifted as months, not counted backwards in days: Q2 counted in days starts on 31 December of the year before, and the comparison column then carries the entire year-end close. With the variance in currency and in per cent. Nothing to compare against reads n/a rather than 0.0%: a percentage of nothing is not a percentage, and printing zero puts the biggest movement on the page at the bottom of the sorted column.

• Drill from any figure to the journal items behind it, already filtered to the accounts, the dates, the journals and the posted state that produced it — the figures, the drill and the list of accounts on no line are all built from one method, so they cannot drift apart into a discrepancy the screen invented. A formula line says so instead, and points at the lines it adds up.

• Posted only, or including drafts — off is what you want while closing and never what you want when reporting, so it is on by default and printed on the PDF when it is off.

• Per journal and per company.

• Print a PDF that keeps the indentation and the bold.

Who can do what

• Financial Report Reader runs a statement and drills into it. This is the one to hand out. Odoo's own read-only accounting group is in the hidden category and cannot be ticked on the Users form, so without this group the only right an administrator could actually give somebody would be Designer — write access to the formulas the whole company reports on.

• Financial Report Designer can write the definitions everybody else runs, and implies the reader.

A formula is checked before it is saved: it takes + - * / and abs, min, max, round, sum over other lines' codes. Raising to a power is left out deliberately — 9**9**9**9 is nine characters and occupies a worker until somebody kills it, and writing report lines is one of the lower rights here.

Report definitions are fenced per company. A run belongs to the person who ran it — including the numbers it produced, which is not everybody's business.

Nothing from Enterprise

The module depends on account and on nothing else. It does not require, use or reimplement account_reports. 19.0 ships the account.report tables in Community while the engine and the screen stay in Enterprise; this module keeps to its own models and does not touch them.