Financial reporting is the process of communicating your company's financial position, performance, and cash flows to stakeholders including management, investors, creditors, and regulatory authoritie...
Last updated Feb 18, 2026 · 3 min read
Light generates four primary financial statements from your ledger:
Balance Sheet shows your financial position at a point in time: assets (what you own), liabilities (what you owe), and equity (owners' stake). It's the foundation of financial analysis and compliance reporting.
Income Statement (P&L) shows your financial performance over a period: revenues earned, expenses incurred, and resulting profit or loss. It answers the question: how profitable were we this period?
Cash Flow Statement shows how cash moved in, out, and between different activities: operations, investing, and financing. It answers: where did our cash come from and where did it go?
Trial Balance lists all GL accounts and their balances. It's used to verify that debits equal credits and to identify any posting errors requiring correction.
These statements form the basis of external reporting to auditors, tax authorities, and investors.
Light's reporting engine segments transactions across multiple dimensions:
Time periods: Daily, monthly, quarterly, annual reporting at any granularity.
Entities: Report by individual company entity or consolidated across all entities.
Currencies: Report in transaction currency, local currency, or group currency.
Departments/Cost centers: Analyze performance by organizational unit.
Business partners: Segment P&L by customer or vendor.
Custom dimensions: Create analysis against your company-specific attributes.
You can combine any dimensions in a single report for sophisticated analysis.
Good to know: Light maintains multi-period reporting history, allowing you to compare current year to prior year or budget to actual.
Light provides standard reports that every organization needs (balance sheet, P&L, cash flow) pre-configured and ready to use. These conform to IAS standards and GAAP.
For unique reporting needs, create custom reports using Light's report builder:
Light saves your custom report template for reuse.
Beyond static reports, Light provides real-time dashboards:
Dashboards update in real-time as transactions post to the ledger.
When your organization includes multiple legal entities (subsidiaries, branches, divisions), consolidation combines them into a single set of financial statements:
This is essential for multinational companies operating through multiple legal structures.
For organizations operating in multiple currencies:
Light calculates and maintains all three currency perspectives for every transaction, enabling flexible reporting.
Compare actual results to budget and to prior year:
This supports management review and decision-making.
Export reports in multiple formats:
Share reports through Light's platform:
Light tracks all reporting activities:
This provides evidence for audit procedures and demonstrates governance of financial reporting.
Light supports compliance reporting for external stakeholders:
Configure what data each report includes and who can access it.
Automate recurring reports:
This reduces manual reporting work and ensures stakeholders receive timely information.
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