3.4. Reports and Closings

The central task of accounting is the evaluation of the entered data. Data collection is a necessary task, and archiving a chore, but technically supported. Accounting 1.0 focused instead on data collection and storage.

The totals and balance lists are a compact evaluation of the stored data. Because before the digitization of such lists had to be laboriously created with an aggregation of the bookings of all accounts, and it often came to arithmetic errors, this type of evaluation was rarely used in the past.

It shows a table with the account number, account name, opening value, total of the periodic and cumulative year entries, each in debit and credit entries, as well as the current balance. In the totals and balances list, debit balances with a positive value and credit balances with minus are displayed. These lists can be displayed on the screen or printed on paper.

However, the balance lists can only show an amount if the accounts were not closed on the balance sheet or the income statement. Otherwise, each account would have a value of zero and this important evaluation would be worthless.

Totals and balance lists can be generated for G / L accounts as well as for personal accounts. You can narrow them down regularly by number range. For balance lists for personal accounts, you can usually choose between sorting by account number or name.

As the balance sheets were no longer painstakingly created by hand, but were constantly available with EDP support, it was possible to print out a balance sheet with a profit and loss account from around 1990 at any time. Of course, only the data entered previously could be processed.

For this purpose, the balance sheet and the income statement must first be set up with their texts. Each row is assigned an amount field for the data of the current year and one for the previous year's data. For totals and subtotals, formulas are stored in the amount fields. For the amount fields not used with formulas, the items to which these accounts are assigned are stored in the master data of the G / L accounts. There can be a fixed assignment. Alternatively, you can define that accounts with debit or credit balances should be assigned to different balance sheet items. Because the software issues credit balances with minus, a reversal of the sign must be provided for the liability side of the balance sheet and for the profit and loss statement. In the income statement, one can limit the sign reversal to the income and take into account the "natural minus" of the effort in the sum formulas.

An alternative approach is the interposition of account groups. As in the case of a clear balance sheet in Accounting 1.0, where the accounts were initially closed via balance sheet items that had to be closed again via the balance sheet, the balance sheet and P & L form is assigned account groups that are defined with a letter code instead of a numerical account number. The account groups define which accounts and which sign they are composed of. This has the advantage that accounts can also be considered in several balance sheet and P & L items, e.g. in two positions with plus and one with minus. This made a much more flexible design possible. Further evaluations could then be made using the same technique (see 3.4.5 List Generator). If then a completely free form design has been made possible and e.g. individual numbers should also be included in a sentence (e.g. "... of which XX.XXX, XX € with a residual maturity over 5 years"), then had to be flexibly defined in the format of the number field, which value of the account group (month or year, current or previous year, ...) should be specified.

This possibility of constant presence of balance sheets and profit and loss accounts is only given if the accounts keep their balance is no longer completed on the balance sheet and income statement.

The development of the BWA is due to the German tax consulting organisation DATEV. Shortly after its founding in February 1966, when DATEV introduced its data processing system in February 1969, it published its "standard BWA No. 1", the most common and widely used version. The BWA system was intended as a reporting system on the profit situation of companies.

The BWA only records business transactions that affect the income statement. For this reason, all income and expenses and revenues are included in BWA. It is structured according to the scaled form of the income statement (Sect. 275 (2) HGB) and therefore starts with the revenues, followed by gross profit, the cost types (such as personnel costs, material costs), interest expense / interest income, taxes and the preliminary result. The under-year BWA is based on a "soft month close" (English soft close). In a second step, these business data can be used to determine business key figures that can be used to compare industries. The standard BWA No. 1 is always uncommented and therefore cannot be compared with an annual report. In addition, it contains no balance sheet figures and is therefore not comparable to financial statements.

The informative value for the companies would be the same, if in the technical preparation of balance sheet and P & L with a list generator in another form, the income statement would be subdivided and added key figures and the evaluations would then be created monthly. On the other hand, a too large variety of differently structured evaluations with the same statements might rather confuse the management.

The Value-Added-Tax (VAT), is the most important type of taxation in the European Union. In Germany, it accounts for just under 31% of tax revenues, followed by wage tax at just over 26%. Both tax types must be managed by the companies. You must calculate the taxes, register and transfer them to the tax office. The administration of sales tax is particularly complex. Accounting 2.0 has developed technical solutions for this. They have seduced the state to make the anti-abuse rules even more complicated and to charge companies with even more bureaucracy, for which the software providers then had to work out new solutions. In Accounting 1.0, these tasks would no longer be possible.

Value added tax is burdening consumers. In principle, the general tax rate applies to all prices of taxable entrepreneurs (the definition of entrepreneur is very broad and only very small companies are exempt). There are also groups of discounted taxed (for example, food, books, ...) and tax-exempt sales (e.g., rents, interest, exports). In Germany, the general tax rate is 19% and the reduced rate is 7%. The taxes that an entrepreneur has already paid on the prices to other entrepreneurs (= input tax), he may deduct the payment to the tax office. Those who only carry out tax-free transactions do not get back the tax paid to other entrepreneurs (exception: exports). If an entrepreneur executes taxable and tax-exempt transactions, part of the tax paid is not deductible. There are also transactions in which an entrepreneur as a buyer may not pay the tax to the performing entrepreneur, but directly to the tax office. He must treat these "reverse charge cases" separately. There is also a specific approach when delivering to or receiving services from other countries of the European Union.

The companies must therefore record their sales and the tax surcharge separately. In addition, they must also enter the net amount and the tax premium separately for all purchases and record intra-EU sales and purchases as well as reverse charge cases. Sales tax codes are used for this. Each document gets a label that marks it as

taxable turnover with general tax rate
taxable sales at a reduced rate
tax-free export
tax-exempt intra-Community delivery
other tax-free sales
Sales executed abroad
Sales in the reverse charge process
Purchase with general tax rate for taxable sales
Purchase at a reduced tax rate for taxable sales
Purchase for other tax-free sales
Purchase in reverse charge procedure
Purchase with general Tax rate for tax-free and taxable sales
Purchase with reduced tax rate for tax. and taxable sales
Purchasing from other European Union
Import from other countries

The indicator can also be stored in the G / L account to which the transaction is posted. Then only transactions with the same tax code can be recorded there. For sales transactions, a G / L account may only contain postings with the same tax codes.

The VAT return, which informs the tax office on a monthly basis of turnover tax and calculates the payment to be made by the undertaking itself, must indicate separately the different sales, the purchases from other European Union countries and the reverse-charge purchases. In addition, the deductible input tax (tax paid to other entrepreneurs) must be stated. This data is assigned to a form line. For mixed taxable and tax-exempt transactions, the other data is needed to calculate the deductible input tax.

The data can not only be used for the tax filing form, which is now electronically transmitted to the tax office. You can also create your own reports according to the tax codes.

Because accounting 2.0 attaches great importance to evaluations, ie the preparation of data for addressees in the company, a flexible instrument for freely formulated regular evaluations is also important. For one-time evaluations, however, one would use a spreadsheet and not an accounting software tool. In section 3.4.2. We have already mentioned a procedure for flexible evaluations in which a free text can first be formulated, inserted in the data fields and assigned to these account groups. Other assignments such as e.g. a date or the current month are possible.

Another possibility of free evaluations is in tables for which rows and columns can be freely assigned. Software solutions that offer this option do not regularly define account groups. Instead, it is first assigned whether the items should be assigned in the rows and different periods in the columns (for example, month, year / current year, previous year / ...)  or vice versa. Then the facts must be described in account areas (from account ... to account ...) or as an enumeration of individual accounts.

An alternative to the list generator is the possibility to export data. Each evaluation (accounts, journals, lists) can be output not only on paper, but also in file formats. The PDF format can already be achieved with the selection of a PDF converter as a printer.

The PDF format can already be achieved with the selection of a PDF converter as a printer. In addition, if the program allows the output of the data in a text or database format (e.g., CSV or DBF), the output file can be opened and processed with a spreadsheet. Would e.g. a balance list for all accounts (even accounts without bookings) is output as a file and then imported into a spreadsheet, then each amount of an account would have the same position for each output file. A balance sheet and P & L could also be created by reading the output file into a worksheet and another worksheet with balance sheet and P & L containing cell references to accounts and account areas in that workspace. Using the same procedure, any other evaluation could be created from the imported balance list that processes the balances of the current year's accounts.

The data exports would even be suitable for spontaneous evaluations, in which the user initially reads a balance list of G / L accounts into a spreadsheet file in order to first of all seek an answer to his questions. If he found her, he could also save his solution and reuse it if necessary. With the possibility to export data, the importance of the own evaluations of accounting programs has decreased. Spreadsheets are often preferred by users because of their flexibility.

For monthly and annual financial statements, a distinction must be made between the technical and organizational procedures. Technically, in a monthly statement only the respective period is blocked for further bookings. Therefore, a monthly statement presupposes that all journals have been printed, the bookings have been checked for correctness by the software and a data backup has been carried out. In addition, the software may require prior to the execution of the monthly statement, that a minimum amount of evaluations has been created. Because reading access to all data is still possible after the end of the month, the evaluations would still be possible later. If the postings for completed periods are to be outsourced to a data carrier and then deleted from the hard disk, a printing of the G / L accounts would be necessary. Due to the meanwhile very large capacity of the data carriers, this outsourcing is usually not necessary during the current financial year.