With a year-end, once you have entered all your information, you
must pass on the reports to your accountant for their magic touch:
depreciation, tax calculations, forms to be filled out and submitted
to the government. By the time you’re done, it could be six
months down the road.
View a sample
journal entry >>
Believe it or not, most competing accounting systems do not properly
allow you to report on your business for past months or years. Some
will allow you to enter the data, but when it comes to reprinting
an accurate set of financial statements for a given point in history,
most fall flat on their face.
With Windward System Five, you can reprint an income and expense
statement for any month, in any year at any time – or reprint
a balance sheet – or an aged accounts receivable – or
payables report.
This is not trivial. When you reprint an aged payables report for
the previous month, they system ignores bills and checks entered
in the current month showing the true condition for the end of the
previous month.
What this means is that you can do your work daily and never get
behind yet still get the reports you need. We have witnessed many
people using other software packages piling up the work on the corner
of their desk until they are finished with a month end and then
frantically playing catch up.
Windward comes with several pre-built ledger reports, such as a
balance sheet, income and expense statements, etc. It also come
with its own ledger report writer – so you can build your own
reports such as comparing income this year to last year and the
year before, or income to budget. Or you can report on different
areas of your business, such as the service side from the parts
sales side.
 40
Year History
We know you don't need 40 years of history, but many programs erase
your data after your year-end. Some generously give you a extra
month (13th month) to clean up your year-end before purging your
data. With Windward, YOU decide when you no longer need the data.
Many products are now sold with 10 year warranties, so we suspect
you'll want to keep your data online for at least 10 years.
Windward System Five keeps track of your business
for the current year, previous year, and many years previous. This
allows you to easily compare how you are doing this year to other
years. Every invoice and transaction created is stored in it's original
form with all its detail.
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When journal entries are required, they
are simple and easy to use and are based on standard, double entries
where the debits must equal the credits. However, if you've made
a large entry and it doesn't balance, Windward will allow you to
save it without posting and return later to finish it off.
Recurring
Entries
Windward System Five will allow you to copy recurring
entries into future months so that you don't have to
post the same entry over and over each month, or possibly
forget to post an entry. You can post forward into any
month in the year and even post into next year.
This can be used for insurance for example. Let's say
you pay $1,200 for insurance for the year in July. Is
this really a July expense for $1,200 or are you in
fact spending $100 per month and just happened to pay
the bill in July?
From an accounting point of view, it's best to expense
a little of this each month so that you can accurately
gauge how much it costs to run your business monthly.
To do this, you would post the $1,200 to prepaid expenses
as an asset (something you own that is of value to the
company) and then remove $100 from prepaid expenses,
and post to insurance expense each month. In Windward,
you can create the entry for one month and then copy
it to the other 11 months, saving you time and effort.
Check
Writing
Normally, you will enter your bills and cheques into
the accounts payable system, but for one-off cheques
for a vendor, you will never deal with again, that is
too much work. Windward System Five will allow you to
create and print checks directly from the journal entry
in a simple one-step method. Windward can print to any
kind of cheque, so you don't need to purchase new ones.
Just use the form designer to set it up.
Profit
and Loss Statement
The income and expense report, also known as the profit
and loss statement, will detail the amount of income
and expense for each ledger number, both for the current
month and a year-to-date total. Using the Windward ledger
report writer, you can build your own reports to compare
this year to last, and the year previous and other reports
important for your business.
Balance
Sheet
The balance sheet report will show you your assets,
liabilities and owner equity. This is the bottom line
that your accountant and banker look for to analyze
the health of your company. By viewing this, you can
see the dollars in your bank, accounts receivable and
inventory on hand, among other details. |
