Annual Report Packs are an annual contract for a chosen number of entities. It’s an annual contract because you typically complete the financial statements for different entities over the course of the year, so a monthly contract doesn’t really work. When you subscribe to Annual Report Packs, you have a choice of being billed monthly or annually in advance. Paying annually gives you a 20% discount off the contract price. If you increase your entity allowance during the contract period how we bill you depends on whether you are paying monthly or annually. If you are paying monthly, we will include a pro-rated top up on your next invoice and your subsequent invoices will be 1/12th of your new annual contract amount. If you are paying annually, we will bill you for a once-off pro-rated top-up as soon as you upgrade so that you are charged based on how many days you were at each entity allowance. If you downgrade during the contract period the next anniversary will roll at the new lower entity allowance. In all cases the annual contract period remains at the same annual dates and doesn’t get reset or extended for upgrades and downgrades during the year. If you delete an entity during the annual contract period it will still count as an active entity for that period, but it will not be included in the following year’s active entities.

Pro Analytics is a month-to-month contract for a chosen number of entities. The monthly subscription is paid in advance. When you start the subscription you choose your preferred number of entities. If you end up adding more entities than your current plan allows, at the end of the month we will bill you for those additional entities at the extra entity rate for your plan. If it would have worked out cheaper on a higher plan we will automatically bill you the lower amount, so you don’t need to stress about what the perfect plan size is at any given time. You can upgrade or downgrade your plan size at any time during the month. Your next month’s bill will be based on the plan size at the end of that billing month plus any extra entities. If you delete an entity during a month it will still count as an active entity for that month, but it will not be included in the following month’s bill.

It’s free to consolidate multiple entities within a single job. You are already paying for each entity and there’s no more data to input except for optional elimination journals. Adding a consolidation allows to to run consolidated report packs in addition to the individual entity report packs. You can even apply normalization adjustments to the consolidated business.

You can point and click to easily add normalization adjustments to change the profit and cash flow for a business. Take out abnormal, private and non-recurring income and expenses. Bring in income and expenses missing from the financial statements. Many accountants and business valuer’s do this to get to the underlying profit and cash flow of the business in order to provide advice or value the business. You can create normalization adjustments inside a Scenario and you can even have multiple scenarios with different adjustments in each. When you create adjustments, normalized versions of the reports will now also be available in the report pack along with the unadjusted versions. Unlike other analytical software products on the market, you don’t need to override the source data to make the adjustments. The original versions of the financial reports remain intact and additional normalized versions are created. There is also a detailed adjustments report that shows each adjustment with any comments provided by the advisor when they made it. Importantly the adjustments are made at the granularity of the account level which means that the normalized P&L is not just an adjustment at the bottom…every line of the P&L shows the normalized version of the account. Doing it with this granularity means that your cash flow, ratios and charts all have a normalized version with full granularity too. We even have an Owners Compensation module where you can make adjustments related to specific stakeholders so that the reports show what adjustments were made for which owner. The Normalization Adjustments module is one of our most popular features and is available in both the Annual Report Packs and Pro Analytics subscriptions.

The Forecasting module allows you to quickly create 3-way forecasts based either upon past periods or from imported or manually entered forecast data. Forecasts are very powerful as they allow you to quickly visualize the potential future for the business based on current trends or a new set of assumptions. Forecasts happen within Scenarios, which means you can create as many versions of the forecasts as you like and display them all in the report pack. You might want to create a combination of base case, best case and worst case forecast scenarios. You can also instantly create a forecast to simply extrapolate the remining periods in the financial year so that you can compare the current part-year to previous full years in the reports and charts. You can then use a forecast as the inspiration for a budget, which you can then track your actual results against over time. Forecasts are only available in the Pro Analytics subscription.

The Pro Analytics subscription allows you to create secure portals for your clients to access. After you start the subscription you will create a Job for each client group. Under a Job is where you add the client’s business entities and where the secure portal lives for that client. The portal is totally optional, but many accountants use it to gather information and share information with their clients. The portal has three main functions: 1) Interactive Online Questionnaires for your clients to complete; 2) File Uploads; and 3) Published Reports. You can invite your clients and any other relevant people (we call them stakeholders) to a specific portal. Our system will sendf them a unique link to register a free account and setup 2-factor authentication before they can access the portal. As the adviser you will be able to see an audit trail in real time of stakeholders that have accessed the portal, questions they’ve answered and files they’ve uploaded or downloaded. You can withdraw a stakeholder’s access at any time. If a stakeholder has registered in our ecosystem once, if they are invited to another portal they still need to accept the invitation but they do not need to re-register to our system.

Absoluetly, it would be strange if you couldn’t. Before you even start a subscription you setup your Firm in our system. Part of that setup is to upload an A4 sized image of your firm’s letterhead, or your preferred front cover design that will appear as the watermark on the front cover of every report pack you generate. If you don’t want to upload a letterhead the watermark will just be blank but the front cover will still work, but just be unbranded. You can also upload an optional small logo of 400px high by 200px wide. You can then select an option where this logo will be included in the top right of every page in the report pack, excluding the front cover. If you’ve uploaded a small logo it will also be shown in the top left when a client logs into the secure portal.

Absolutely. Out of the box Analytics Ultimate will generate a comprehensive report pack but you can customize the reports in many different ways. We use the term “Report Bundle” when referring to a collection of reports that is ultimately generated. The report bundle is made up of any number of individual reports. Each individual report has various built-in options that can be changed and saved. For example, you might want to filter a P&L report to only show a certain number of periods, or to only show full years, or to toggle the YTD column on or off. Every kind of report has different kinds of options suitable for that report type. You can also create your own custom account categories (we call them Account Tags, Xero calls them Tracking Categories and Quickbooks calls them Classes and Locations). Once you’ve created your account tags you can add accounts to each tag and the reports will show subtotals for each account tag. You then have an option to show the subaccount details or just the header account in each report. You might create an extra copy of the P&L, one with collapsed account tags and one with the subaccounts expanded, it’s up to you. You can also create your own reports and charts from scratch. Custom reports can include headings, paragraphs, images, custom tables, charts, PDF’s and even other reports. There is no end to the flexibility. If you create a custom report you’d like to use again just save it as a Firm Template and you can use it again as you need.

When you first register for free with Analytics Ultimate you are just a user floating in the system. The first thing you need to do is create your Firm. Your firm is your business as the advisor, or if you are analyzing your own business it’s just your business. It’s free to setup a Firm. You can start setting up your preferences at the Firm level (like the letterhead image to show on the front cover of reports) and you can invite your staff (not clients) to have access to your firm. When you invite staff you can give them access to all Jobs under your firm or just specific Jobs. Once you have setup your Firm you then need to start one or both of the Subscription types. Once the subscription has been created you can then start adding Jobs to that subscription. Think about Jobs in terms of the report packs you will be generating. All entities within a Job will be included in the report pack for that Job. So if you have a client group with several entites and you want them to appear in a single report (whether you consolidate the entities or not) then they need to be inside a single Job. Once you have created the Job you create as many Entities as you need under that Job. You will enter the data (or connect to the bookkeeping account) at the Entity level. If you want to consolidate multiple entities they all need to be created inside the same Job and the consolidation reports will be included in that Job’s reports. Finally, the secure client portal (if available for the subscription level) is automatically created inside a specific Job and the questionnaires and files will relate to the Entities in that Job. If you want to create a custom report or questionnaire that you can use across various Jobs you create it as a Firm template and import them into your Jobs as you need them.

Some of the most important busines data is often not shown on the financial statements. Key Performmance Indicators are the other types of data that you need budget and track to understand the perfance of the business or to look for leading or lagging indicators. In Analytics Ultimate you can create as many KPI’s as you like for each Entity. You can enter budget, actual and forecast data for each period and track the KPI’s in your reports and charts. An example of a good KPI might be the number of quotes issued by the business, which would be a good leading indicator worth tracking over time. Staff headcount might another KPI that is interesting in itself but can also be used as a meaningful Custom Ratio. You can create as many Custom Ratios as you like for each Entity. Custom ratios need a numerator and a denominator. You need to link each to a data type in the system, with KPI’s being one of the many data types. For example you might create a custom ratio of Total Operating Revenue divided by Staff Headcount to get a ratio of Revenue per Staff Member. KPI’s and Custom Ratios used together will give you very powerful insight into data you can’t see in the financial statements. Custom KPI’s and Custom Ratios are only available in the Pro Analytics subscription

Our custom chart functionality is not only best in class but is fun to use to explore the entity’s data. You can create a line or bar chart over any set of periods, with as many datasets as you like. Datasets are linked to different data types in the system. You can select a dataset by account (e.g. Sales of Product 1), account type (e.g. Total Operating Revenue), account tag (e.g. Staff Costs), subtotal (e.g. EBITDA), KPI (e.g. Quotes Issued), Ratio (e.g. Debtor Days), or Custom Ratio (“Revenue per Staff Member”). The datasets become the lines (or bars) on your chart. We have numerous built-in charts by default but you can create as many additional charts as you like. Custom charts are only available in the Pro Analytics subscription.

In Analytics Ultimate, forecasts are used as an exploration tool to consider the potential future of the business, potentially under different scenarios using different assumptions. Forecasts can be generated automatically from previous periods with chosen growth rates, or you can import a forecast using our template, or simply enter them manually on the screen. Forecasts are designed to be ephemeral and to get overtaken by the actual data over time. Budgets on the other hand are designed to be carefully decided and saved against the entity permanently (although they can certainly be amended at any time if you need to). Budgets may be inspired by exploring forecast scenarios or can be imported using our import template or manually entered. Using budgets enables budget vs actual reports and charts which can be tracked over time. Budgets are only available in the Pro Analytics Subscription.