Performance and Report Formats, explained.

Performance opens on two tabs. Financial History shows your actuals for every reporting line, one column per period. Switch the period toggle between Annual, Monthly and, where the statement supports it, TTM for trailing twelve months. Annual has one column per year. On Monthly and TTM, pick the period from the Year end dropdown. Monthly ends with a Full Year column, or Year to Date while the year is still running.

Performance vs Plan is the month in context. Choose the Month, and in Compare to pick the adopted Budget or the adopted Revised Forecast. If neither is adopted there is no Compare to dropdown, and the plan columns show the rolling 12 month forecast, headed Forecast. The table has three groups of columns: the month, year to date and trailing twelve months. Each group shows the actual, the plan and the prior year, then a Variance pair: against the plan and against the prior year. The variance columns carry a small bar, blue to the right when the figure is up, red to the left when it is down. A company with twelve months of history or fewer gets a shorter table: the month and year to date only, each with the actual, the plan and one variance. The tab only appears once there is something to compare against.

Beneath both tabs sit the statements: P&L, Balance Sheet, Cash Flow, Key Metrics, plus Indicators for hand-entered figures. Sales & Margin appears when the company has Units. Dimensions, for breaking the P&L down by department, region or any other dimension, appears in Financial History once one dimension is enabled, and in Performance vs Plan once two are.

Indicators holds non-financial indicators such as headcount, transactions or enquiries: numbers that matter but are not in the accounts, typed in month by month. The tab appears when your workspace has indicators switched on, and the Non-Financial Indicators guide covers setting them up and reading them.

Drilling in. Click any line's name, or the small chart icon that appears at its left, and the line opens in the line window: the headline figure, how it moved against last month and last year, its trend chart with a TTM or Monthly toggle, and supporting charts for growth and percentage of sales. A Start Date dropdown in the header moves the chart back in time.

Above both tabs sits Rename. Tick it, type a new name, and the line is called that everywhere, including its total row. The original name stays shown beneath so you never lose track of what it was.

Appearance. The preview at the top is drawn with exactly the styles the report uses, so it is a faithful miniature. Beneath it, four groups: Title style gives the row a background (Main title in pale blue, Second title, Subtitle in pale orange, or none). Text offers Bold, Italic, Uppercase and Indent. Rules draws a thin or thick line Above and Below. Spacing adds a gap above or below.

Visibility. The preview here shows structure rather than looks: where the line and its sub-items will land. Show this line as is one choice of four: a heading with its sub-items beneath, a single line showing its total, just its sub-items with no heading, or hidden. Two extra options: skip a lone sub-item and show what is beneath it directly, and keep the line even in months with no figures. Don't show totals drops the Total row under a group. And Hide from Financials reports or Hide from Forecast reports hides the line on one side only, which the two pills under the preview confirm.

Hide Cash or Tangible Assets on the balance sheet and a red warning reminds you that those lines are forecast as a category, so hiding them means a manual forecast instead.

In the document builder, a P&L or Cash Flow block has a Type dropdown. Choose Profit and Loss (by format) or Cash Flow (by format) and a Report Format dropdown appears listing your Report Formats, Actuly's included. Balance Sheet and Key Metrics blocks are always by format, so the dropdown is simply there. A Custom Table has a By format mode too. And the Full Report block, which puts a whole statement on the page, monthly, annual or TTM, from your actuals or from a forecast, has a Report Format dropdown that defaults to the company's active one. It is wide, so the editor suggests a landscape section for it.

Everything in the format carries through: renamed lines, bold and indents, rules and spacing, collapsed groups, hidden lines. The table in the document, the preview in the editor and the PDF are all drawn from the same merged layout.

The one thing to watch. A document block remembers which format it uses. Delete that format in Performance and the block keeps showing its last figures behind an amber warning, with a Reset and refresh button that falls back to the active Report Format. Rename a format freely; delete one only when nothing points at it.