Enhancing client reporting: what's new and what's to come

At FreeAgent, we know that effective reporting is critical to the success of your clients’ businesses - and, ultimately, the success of your practice.

That’s why we’re embarking on an exciting journey to enhance our client reporting. In a series of improvements that will be rolling out in the coming months, we’ll be building up the capabilities of our reports to offer everything a practice needs to produce thorough financial and management reports.

“We’ve listened to Partners’ requests for more flexible and robust reporting functionality and we’re really excited to have already kicked off development towards this. Soon, FreeAgent’s reporting capabilities will enable Partners to deliver an even more premium service to their clients,” says Stu McEwan, Staff Product Manager at FreeAgent.

To lay the foundations for this longer-term development, we’ve already made changes to FreeAgent’s existing client reporting functionality, which is designed to give you the flexibility you need to access and interpret financial data quickly and in a way that suits you.

In this blog, we’ll take a closer look at these recent updates and the exciting new functionality to come.

Increased flexibility of existing reports

We’ve made a series of improvements to the Profit & Loss (P&L), Balance Sheet, Aged Debtors and Creditors, and Customer Sales reports to allow you to view and analyse data with greater ease and clarity.

These changes make the reports easier to use and will also give you increased confidence in any decisions you make for your client based on their business performance.

Profit & Loss report enhancements

What’s new?

• Gross Profit Line: We’ve added a gross profit line to the P&L report, so you no longer have to calculate this crucial figure manually.
• Category Totals: This column will give you a clearer overview of each area of a client’s business or financial performance, enabling quicker insights without needing to drill down into individual transactions.

Balance Sheet enhancements

What’s new?

• Monthly and Quarterly Balance Sheets: This is perfect for clients who require more frequent financial tracking or for practices that need to provide periodic insights.
• Comparative Balance Sheets: We’ve also added the ability to compare balance sheets across different periods, so you can quickly spot trends, assess performance, and make more informed decisions on behalf of your clients.

These updates make the Balance Sheet a much more powerful tool for businesses and practices that need timely and comparative data for performance analysis.

Aged Debtors and Creditors improvements

Tracking outstanding payments and liabilities is crucial for maintaining healthy cashflow, so we’ve improved both Aged Debtors and Aged Creditors reports to give you more control over the data.

What’s new?

• Due Date Column: Now, you can easily see when payments are expected or overdue. This will help you prioritise actions and stay on top of receivables and payables.
• Ageing by Due Date or Invoice/Bill Date: This gives you more flexibility depending on how your clients track and manage their payments.
• Column Sorting: You can now organise the data in the way that makes the most sense for your practice.

Customer Sales report improvements

Understanding customer sales performance is essential for making strategic decisions, so we’ve added a new feature to the Customer Sales report that will give you more comprehensive insights.

What’s new?

• Totals Per Period: This new row gives you a quick, high-level view of your clients’ sales performance over different periods - ideal for spotting trends and comparing different timeframes at a glance.

Improved design and usability

We’ve also made some significant updates to the design and functionality of our reports. These changes are all about providing you with a cleaner, more intuitive experience, helping you find the insights you need more easily and efficiently.

A cleaner, more cohesive design

We've moved away from our standard table format and created a layout that makes it much easier to spot key figures at a glance. Designs are now more consistent, and we’ve focused on improving the readability and clarity of the reports so that you can more easily identify trends or insights that are important for your client.

Enhanced date selection and filtering

We know that managing dates and accounting years can sometimes be fiddly, so we’ve worked hard to make our date selection and filtering clearer and more intuitive.

It’s now much easier to see what you're trying to filter by, and you’ll be able to quickly adjust date ranges without confusion. The system also now automatically pulls through the accounting year you’ve set up for the client, so you no longer have to remember or manually select it.

Looking ahead: a commitment to continuous improvement

In the new year, we’ll be launching the first version of Management Accounts. This brand new functionality will enable you to collate and customise existing financial reports based on your clients’ needs.

From there, we’ll turn our attention to additional reporting elements such as budgets and departmental reporting and continue to focus on enhancing our Management Accounts functionality.

Stu says, “As we continue to develop FreeAgent, we want to ensure that our reporting tools support the increasingly sophisticated needs of accounting practices and their clients. Our goal is to help you make smarter, more informed financial decisions with greater ease - and these updates are just the first step on that journey.”

We’ll keep you updated as and when these roll-outs happen. But in the meantime, you can keep up with all our latest product updates on the portal.