What is management accounts?
A monthly P&L, balance sheet and cash view you can actually read.
Some businesses call it "management accounts," others "the monthly financials" or "the reporting package" — same document, three names. It is a formatted profit & loss, balance sheet, and cash view built off a closed ledger, put together so an owner who has never opened a trial balance can read it in about ten minutes and know whether the month was good, and why. A raw trial balance export with two hundred GL accounts down the left column is not a management accounts pack — it is data waiting to be turned into one.
It is built from a closed period, not instead of one. The close — accruals, prepaid amortization, deferred revenue, a fixed close date — is a separate discipline that gets the ledger itself correct; management accounts assumes that work is already done and turns the resulting trial balance into something a non-accountant reader can use. Every summary line traces back to specific GL accounts; nothing on the pack is a parallel spreadsheet kept outside the books.
Why it matters
| Without a system | With CapEasy |
|---|---|
| Performance problems surface a quarter late | A pack that lands on the same day each month |
| Board and investor reporting becomes a scramble before each meeting | Variance against budget, explained in a written note |
| Cash runway is an estimate rather than a number | Board-ready reporting produced from the close you were already doing |
What we need from you
From the close
- Reconciled general ledger
- Trial balance
- AR and AP aging
- Inventory reports if applicable
For comparison
- Budget and forecast data
- Prior period statements
- Segment or entity structure
How it runs, step by step
- Monthly
- Profit & loss
- Balance sheet
- Cash flow statement
- Quarterly
- Consolidated statements
- Quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year comparison
- Cash flow trend analysis
- Year-end
- Year-end statement preparation
- Supporting schedules
- Fixed asset reconciliation
- Management reporting
- Break-even analysis
- Profitability by product or service
- Working capital analysis
Who does what
| Your CapEasy team | Management accounts, the reconciliations and reporting behind it, and the questions list that keeps it honest. |
| Your CPA or enrolled agent | Everything that carries a licence in United States — rendered exactly as written: issue compilation, review or audit reports — those are restricted to licensed cpa firms. |
| You | One conversation with one named person, and the decisions that are genuinely yours. |
Management accounts in United States
UAA s.14(a) — preparation is not the same act as the report
The Uniform Accountancy Act restricts who may issue a compilation, review, or audit report — that restriction sits on the report and the opinion attached to it, not on the act of preparing financial statements. We prepare the P&L, balance sheet, and cash view; a licensed CPA is the one who can attach a report, and only if the engagement calls for one.
The label on the page is not decorative
A pack handed to a lender or investor without a basis label can read as though it carries assurance it does not. "Unaudited — prepared by management," printed on every distributed page, tells a third-party reader exactly what level of scrutiny sits behind the numbers: none beyond internal preparation.
Matching still governs a pack built for readability
GAAP's matching principle — expenses recognized in the period that produced the related revenue — is what makes a comparative layout mean anything. A pack is only as trustworthy as the closed ledger it is built from; if the period was not closed to accrual, the readable pack inherits the same distortion, just with better formatting.
Loan covenants usually specify which tier of financials
Credit agreements commonly step reporting by tier: monthly or quarterly internally prepared statements, with an annual CPA-reviewed or audited statement layered on top. A management accounts pack satisfies the internally prepared tier; it does not substitute for whatever attest-level statement the loan agreement requires annually.
What your CPA or enrolled agent receives from us
- A comparative profit & loss — this month, prior month, and the same month a year ago.
- A balance sheet as of period end, with GL detail collapsed into plain-language summary lines.
- A cash position reconciled to the bank, presented alongside the accrual P&L, with the gap between them called out explicitly.
- A short narrative flagging anything that moved meaningfully, in plain language, without a full variance-to-budget breakdown.
- A tie-out schedule showing which GL accounts roll into each summary line.
- The "Unaudited — Prepared by Management" basis label on every page distributed outside the business.
