08.13 Reporting Over Planning: P&L Quick Start Templates

What FastClose ships with

FastClose includes a set of prebuilt P&L / Income Statement report templates. They are ready to use and designed to be adapted to your chart of accounts — you don't need to build a planning report from scratch.

Find them via File → Home → Solutions in FastClose Designer.

Duplicate sets are provided to cover two common sourcing configurations:

• Actuals from ERP, budgets/plans also from the ERP (for organisations that import budgets into the GL) - we aren't interested in these here.

• Actuals from ERP, budgets/plans from FastClose Planning — this is the set to use

Within each set, further variants handle signing conventions:

• Sales and Expenses both shown as positive numbers

• Sales positive, Expenses negative

• Natural sign (Sales negative, Expenses positive — as they appear natively in the GL)

The available P&L templates

01 GL Balances for Management Reporting
A GL balance report with calculations pre-configured to sign data correctly for management use. The best starting point if you want to build your own P&L from this base.

P&L Cumulative This Year to Date with Target
Columns: Actual YTD / Budget YTD / Variance YTD / Budget Full Year

P&L Quarterly with Target
Columns: Actuals and Budget for each quarter, with variance

P&L Rolling Three Months
Columns: Three most recent months — actuals and budget side by side

P&L This Year to Date by Month
Columns: Each month of the year; actuals to current month, budget from current month forward

P&L This Month vs YTD vs Last Year
Columns: Current month actuals / YTD actuals / Same period last year / Budget

Projected Latest Estimate
Columns: Actuals to the current reporting month + planning figures for the remainder of the year = full-year projected outturn. A practical way to track how the year is developing against the original budget.

Adapting a solution to your business

A walkthrough video is linked from the P&L Quick Start documentation page. The essential steps:

1. Open the solution from File → Home → Solutions.

2. Open the hierarchy attached to the report (Rows / Columns → edit the hierarchy). It contains a sample P&L structure with example account code ranges.

3. Edit the hierarchy: replace the sample account ranges with your actual account codes. Match your P&L structure — rename nodes to match your line names, add or remove nodes to suit.

4. Review the signing calculations (FastClose tab → Calculations) and adjust if your actuals appear with the wrong sign for any P&L line.

5. Set the Scenario filter to your FastClose planning scenario. The template's column structure will separate actuals from budget automatically.

6. Run the report and review. Adjust period filters as needed.

7. Save the report with your own name.

What you've learned

You can locate, adapt, and use FastClose's prebuilt P&L report templates to show actuals alongside FastClose planning figures — from the first day of the planning cycle through to end-of-year reporting.