Reports Overview
Reports allow you to get a detailed view of your cashflows (income and expenses) over a period of time, to understand where your money is coming from and going. Reports can be customised and filtered in many ways to enable you to see exactly what you want. They can be used for multiple use cases to provide more clarity and save you time. Here are a few ways we’ve found useful:
- Financial Planning: Getting a complete picture of your income and spending over a period of time so you can quickly see where you are on your financial journey and plug holes in your cashflow to increase your savings rates over time.
- Saving time doing taxes: You can build custom reports to quickly show you all your income and legitimate expenses that you need to file your tax returns each year.
- Saving time doing expense reports: If you have work related expenses that need to be reimbursed, you can use reports to keep track of them and save time filing your reports.
Because Angelfish is built on top of a database, you will find it much easier to slice and dice your reports than using a spreadsheet to see exactly what you want. However, should you wish to move to a spreadsheet, you can easily export your report into a beautifully designed Excel spreadsheet to do further analysis.
Creating Reports
You can create different reports with different filters and settings so you can easily come back to them later if needed. By default Angelfish provides a simple monthly Income and Expenses report across all of your accounts, categories and tags, but you can easily create additional customised reports.
Note:
Angelfish will only support Income & Expense reports to start with. Over time we will add additional types of reports so you can view data using different charts or tables.
To create a new report, click the the Create Report button at the bottom of the left menu to open the report creation dialog with the following options:
| Option |
Description |
| Name |
The name of the report so you can easily find it in the reports list on the left hand menu. |
| Reporting Interval |
Monthly or Quarterly. This will change how the numbers are reported in the report, either a monthly breakdown or quarterly breakdown |
| Currency |
Select the currency you want the report to be stated in. By default it will select your local currency but you can choose to change it to any other supported currency if required |
| Foreign Currency Conversion |
For all amounts not already stated in the selected currency above, what conversion rate do you want to use to convert them to the currency of the report? You can use the current currency exchange rate, but this will lead to numbers changing whenever you open the report as the currency exchange rate changes. Hence you can also select the monthly average or annual average of the selected period. For example if you are viewing a report from January 2018 until June 2018, and select monthly average, the expenses for each month will be converted using the monthly average exchange rate for that particular month in 2018. If you select the annual average, it will use the average exchange rate for that currency in 2018 to convert any foreign currencies. This will lead to reports that are based on the exchange rate at the time you received the income or made an expense, and will ensure numbers do not fluctuate as you change your report period to earlier months and years. |
| Accounts Tab |
This tab will list all of the accounts for your household, and allow you to filter to only show income and expenses from particular accounts if needed |
| Categories Tab |
This tab will list all of the categories for your household, and allow you to filter to only show income and expenses from particular categories if needed |
| Tags Tab |
This tab will list all of the tags for your household, and allow you to filter to only show income and expenses with particular tags applied if needed |
Filtering Reports
Once your report is created, you will have the following filters on the report so you can show particular dates and views of your income and expenses. The filters are reset whenever you open a report again, unlike the report settings above which are persisted:
- Time Period Filter: This dropdown allows you to change the reporting period for the report. By default the report will open to show you the past 12 months, but you can change this to also show:
- This Year: Will only show you periods starting from January of the current calendar year.
- Last Year: Will only show you periods from January to December for the last calendar year.
- Custom Period: Will allow you to select a report period between two specific dates inclusive. Transactions that occur on those dates will also be included.
- User Filter: This selector enables you to filter the report to show all the household transactions combined, or filter for just a particular user in the household. For example if you only want to see the Income and Expenses for accounts belonging to yourself and not your spouse, you can use this filter to select just your transactions.
Using Reports
The Income and Expenses report will show a breakdown by Group and Categories for each period. By default it will show a row for each Category Group so you can see the total amount per period for that Group, but you can expand that row to show the detailed spending at a Category level if needed.
If you click on a number in the report table, a list of transactions will appear at the bottom of the screen that contributed to that periods number. This allows you to quickly check any numbers that look incorrect. In addition, just like on the Accounts page, you will be able to edit transactions in the list directly if needed, to quickly fix any errors (for example like a transaction being in the wrong category) and see the report update immediately.
Exporting Reports
If you need to export the data to do further analysis or share with a 3rd party like your accountant, Angelfish allows you to export the entire report as a Microsoft Excel file. This file format is supported by most Spreadsheet tools and Google Docs, so don’t worry if you don’t have Excel on your computer, you will easily be able to view and edit the file using other applications too.
Unlike many personal finance apps that lose a lot of the design and fidelity of the report when you export their reports, Angelfish is designed to export your report to an Excel file that uses the same colors and design as the reports page in the app.