Flash Report Template for Google Sheets and Excel

‍Why use Monthly Flash Reports?

Bookkeepers, Accountants, CPAs as well as Fractional CFOs become better advisors to their clients and save hours of time of manual work with Flash Reports. C-suite and Business Owners, in their turn, can compare their performance month-to-month, same period last year, or each individual month this year to last year. 

Flash Reports are irreplaceable to spot threats and opportunities for companies of all sizes. It’s is the tool you can use to prevent problems ahead of time and make your company more successful.

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Flash Report Template

Below you will find a Flash Report template developed by GrowthLab Financial, a Finance as a Service company that serves Founders and Management Teams with Financial Planning & Analysis, Bookkeeping, Accounting, Virtual CFO, and Tax Advisory & Planning Services. 

This report was first presented by GrowthLab’s Director of Corporate Development & Strategy Korey Cournoyer during The Appy Hour Webinar hosted by certified QuickBooks ProAdvisors Liz Scott and Heather Satterley. 

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What’s included in the monthly flash report?

The Flash report consists of 5 different areas: 

• A Balance Sheet snapshot to monitor your assets and liabilities 
• A summary overview of the Income Statement/P&L to monitor your Revenue, Cost of Goods Sold, Operating Expenses and Net Income or Loss
• A summary Cash Flow analysis to monitor your Beginning and Ending Cash and Cash Burn
• A variance snapshop to understand whether you’re on or off plan.

Check the webinar with a step-by-step video instruction here starting from 57:28 min.

To create a Flash Report, you will use Profit & Loss, Balance Sheet and Cash Flow reports from QuickBooks Online.

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How do I build a Flash Report for myself?

1. Open this template and make a copy. This is your playground to set up your own Flash Report.

2. Install LiveFlow Google Sheets Add-on to automatically bring your QuickBooks reports into Google Sheets without any manual work.
   
   
3. Import your Profit & Loss, Balance Sheet and Cash Flow reports to your spreadsheet.

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4. Now, copy and paste essential Account Names from your Chart of Accounts from Profit & Loss, Balance Sheet and Cash Flow into your own Flash Report tab. Then choose the months you want to compare, for example, March 2022 to March 2021. Paste these months’ names for your reports.

5. Set up the formulas. Click on a numerical value in the original Flash report tab and find the formula in C6 of Balance Sheet. There you will find “Horizontal LOOKUP (=HLOOKUP)”.

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= HLOOKUP(search_key, range, index, [is_sorted])

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It searches across the first row of a range for a key and returns the value of a specified cell in the column found.

This formula will grab your month as a search_key and then will look at the entire account & month range from the Balance Sheet. Then you need to specify the row index of the value to be returned and set up the [is_sorted] status as FALSE to get an exact match returned. 

You can copy and paste this formula from the template:

=HLOOKUP(C$4,'Balance Sheet by Month'!$A$10:$R$28,6,false)

6. Now, replace the value inside the quotation marks identifying your Balance Sheet. 
   
   In our example, the sheet tab is named Balance Sheet by Month, so all you have to do is to rename those to your own names, and then take the name you added and add replace that in the 'Balance Sheet by Month' string.
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7. Then, do that everywhere you find the Balance Sheet by Month, Profit & Loss by Month and Cash Flow by Month in the formula.
   
   
8. Once done, make sure you change the index to reference the correct row index for your account names.
   
   
9. The final bit is to calculate your Variance Snapshots. Compare your Actuals vs Annual Operation Planning (AOP) and see whether you’re over or under delivering by deducting Actuals from AOP and looking at the percentage value.

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10. Once the formulas are set up, double check they are working correctly by cross-referencing the numbers in your Flash Report with the numbers in each of your tabs.
    
    
11. Done! Now, you can invite other people to view and comment on the Flash Report. Or you can publish the Report to web to share it as a live, auto-updated dashboard with necessary stakeholders.
    
    

Need personal help? Book a call with our team here. 

You can find more free templates such as Consolidated P&L, Marketing P&L, Budget vs Actuals, P&L MoM by Class and others in the LiveFlow Template Library.

To create live Flash Reports that will automatically update the Profit and Loss, Balance Sheet and Cash Flow reports, install LiveFlow for free here.