Reports and cash flow

A report in SageFin is a question with a saved shape. Cash Flow, Spending, Income, Budget vs Actual, Net Worth Trend and Investment Allocation are not hand-built pages — they are saved questions, and anything you can build yourself uses the same machinery they do.

Business tax prep is the exception, and the section below says why.

Finding a report

The menu beside the Reports title lists every report — the built-ins, anything you have saved, and Business tax prep — and searching it finds one by name.

The reports you use most can sit beside it as tabs. Pin one with the pin on its row in the menu, or with Pin while it is open. Cash Flow, Spending and Income are pinned until you change them. When more are pinned than fit on one line, the last few stay in the menu marked Doesn't fit, and the count after the tabs opens it. To change their order, drag a pinned report by its grip at the top of the menu, or focus the grip and use the arrow keys.

A built-in you never use can be hidden. Hiding moves it into a collapsed hidden list at the bottom of the menu, where Restore brings it back. Nothing is removed, and a link to a hidden report still opens it. Deleting is different: it is only for reports you saved yourself, and it cannot be undone.

Business tax prep starts out hidden until you add a business, because until then it has nothing to show. The first business brings it back on its own. If you restore or pin it before that, it stays where you put it.

Pins and hidden reports belong to the household, so they are the same on every device you sign in from.

Add to sidebar, beside Pin, is the personal version: it puts the open report under Favorites in your own sidebar, on every page, and nobody else in the household sees it. Up to seven fit. Common questions says more about the sidebar.

The two kinds of question

Every report is one of two shapes, and knowing which you want is most of building one.

How much moved? Spending, income, cash flow. These read your transactions over a period.

What was it worth? Net worth, balance sheet, investment allocation. These read balances at a point in time.

The distinction matters because it decides what a date means. On the first kind a date range is the window money moved through. On the second, a date is the moment you are asking about — and asking about two different moments is how you get a trend.

Cash flow

The one most people want first: what came in, what went out, what is left, by month.

It is worth knowing this is a saved report rather than a fixed page, because it means you can take a copy and change it — the same question restricted to one account, or one category group, or without the transfers that make an ordinary month look chaotic.

Building your own

Open a report and edit it, or start from nothing. You choose what is measured, how it is grouped, and over what period. Saving it keeps it beside the built-ins.

You can also describe one. Ask Sage for the report you want in a sentence and it drafts the shape — then the draft opens in the builder rather than arriving as an answer. That is deliberate: the assistant chooses what to ask, the engine computes it, and you get to see the question before you trust the number. A model that both picked the question and reported the figure would be a second place for a number to go wrong.

Budget vs actual

Worth calling out because it is the one report that reads two things at once — your budgets and your transactions — and answers the question people actually have at the end of a month, which is not what did I spend but what did I spend against what I meant to.

Two places a report approximates, and says so

Investment reports rest on prices, and prices are the one input SageFin does not always have.

Holdings have no history. Asking what your portfolio was worth last March values today's holdings at last March's prices — which is right if you held the same things and wrong if you did not.

A missing closing price falls back to the current one. Where no close is on file for a date, the institution's latest price is used instead.

Both are named in the report rather than hidden, which is the point: an investment figure from a date you did not trade on is reliable, and one from a month you rebalanced is a reasonable estimate. Knowing which you are looking at is the difference.

Business tax prep

The one report that is not a saved question. Schedule C has a fixed shape — thirty-one numbered lines, in order, with its subtotals spelled out — so there is nothing to build. Pick a business and a tax year, optionally narrow to a quarter, and the same cash-basis figures behind your accountant pack are laid out on that skeleton.

Two things about it are worth knowing before you copy anything onto a form.

Some lines say "not tracked" rather than $0.00. Returns and allowances (line 2), cost of goods sold (line 4) and business use of your home (line 30) have no tax line in SageFin, so it cannot tell "you had none" from "you never recorded any". It says so instead of printing a zero you might believe. The subtotals underneath still compute, treating those lines as nothing — which is the only thing the books can do — and the note under the table tells you that is what happened. If any of the three applies to you, it is yours to fill in.

The quarters are calendar quarters. Q2 here is April to June. The IRS estimated-tax periods are not quarters at all — they run January–March, April–May, June–August and September–December — so a quarter here is a period to look at, not a payment to work out.

Any line with transactions behind it opens: click its description to see the rows that made the figure, which is how you check one rather than trust it. The Export CSV button writes the same statement, line detail included, from the same figures on screen.

It is a preparation aid. It is not an official IRS form, nothing is filed anywhere, and none of it is tax advice.

Exporting

Any report that reads transactions — Cash Flow, Spending, Income, Budget vs Actual, or one you built — has an Export button that writes what is on screen as a CSV: the breakdown, the month-by-month series and the totals. An edit you have not saved exports as it stands, so there is no need to save a report just to get a file of it.

Three things in the file are there because a spreadsheet loses what the page shows:

• If the report could not run whole, the file says so first, above any number — the same notice the page shows, because a filter that was not applied makes every figure broader than you asked.
• A report with two levels of grouping marks each row's level. Totals and their breakdown sit in one column, so add up one level or the other, never both.
• Each period carries the dates it really covers. The current month is only as long as the month so far, and the file says which days that is.

Balances reports — net worth, the balance sheet, investments — do not export yet.

Transactions themselves export from Settings → Data — useful when the question you have is one nobody has built a report for yet.

If you are exporting for an accountant rather than for yourself, there is a better route: tracking a business.