Financial statements preparation software or DIY

[primuspaul]

When I need to prepare financial statements (balance sheet, income statement, etc...), I generally use an excel template I made which draws account information from one table and generates pivot tables using that info. To make all this work, the data table draws information from other tables (primarily using index(match) and sumifs()). Most of the calculations, like whether the date dictates expense account activity belongs on the income statement or balance sheet (retained earnings), is done through calculations on the actual table due to the limitations of pivot tables. It also uses various custom, user-defined commands to accomplish some of the more complicated features.

It works just fine, but I want something a bit more powerful to be able to create better tables. Obviously QuickBooks is the most obvious example of a fully-features program, but I want to make something custom similar to what I have in excel and also more powerful (like the ability to generate custom "reports" instead of having to rely on pivot tables).

Can someone recommend a solution that is free and possibly even open source?

I do have experience with simple coding, like in Visual Basic and JavaScript.

 

[Johnny C]

There isn't much out there for a small set of accounts that is a) highly flexible and b) free. It's the b) bit that's the killer, no-one is going spend a considerable amount of time to develop a free flexible, robust model that takes any format of account transactions or balance sheets and allows customised manipulation.

Rather than use pivot tables, you could use regular tables that use functions like sumifs to summarise base data tables and write VBA to autorefresh the tables when you paste into the base data.

 

[primuspaul]

There isn't much out there for a small set of accounts that is a) highly flexible and b) free. It's the b) bit that's the killer, no-one is going spend a considerable amount of time to develop a free flexible, robust model that takes any format of account transactions or balance sheets and allows customised manipulation.

Rather than use pivot tables, you could use regular tables that use functions like sumifs to summarise base data tables and write VBA to autorefresh the tables when you paste into the base data.

Any paid software out there?

 

[Johnny C]

I used to use something called TaxCalc. But you had to get information into their format and it was only for preparing accounts for small British Ltd. companies. It was more of a pain than to do it on a spreadsheet, the only advantage was it would prepare and submit a CT600 corporation tax to HMRC (the govt tax dept), using the HMRC whacky adobe executable was just too much pain.

it all depends on how big the company you're preparing accounts for is, it sounds like it's more than my small Ltd. company. It also depends on which country you're doing it in I guess. If it is more than a 1 man band like me, Sage might be worth a look at