Balance sheet

Your balance sheet is built from the ledger you post to, as of any moment you choose. There is no export step, no month-end assembly, and no reporting pipeline for you to build or maintain — Ledfra keeps the figures current as your transactions arrive.

This is the report a founder hands to an investor and a controller hands to an accountant. It answers one question: at this instant, what does the business own, what does it owe, and what is left over? Accountants also call it the statement of financial position; the product calls it what everyone else does.

What it answers

Unlike profit & loss, which covers a span of time, a balance sheet is a snapshot. You pick a moment — the as-of date — and the report sums every entry posted up to it. Change the date and you are looking at a different instant in the same ledger, not a different data source.

For a marketplace, the interesting line is usually the one people forget to model: money you are holding for someone else. Collect $100 on a host's behalf and your assets go up $100 — but $90 of it belongs to the host and sits in liabilities. A balance sheet is where that distinction becomes visible, and where a ledger that booked the whole $100 as revenue starts looking obviously wrong.

The accounting equation, enforced

Every balance sheet rests on one identity:

Assets = Liabilities + Equity

In most systems that identity is something you hope holds. In Ledfra it holds because every transaction is balanced when it is written — an unbalanced entry set is rejected at the API boundary, so there is no path by which a lopsided posting reaches the report. The statement shows the three sides separately, and it ties out on its own.

If the sides ever disagree, the report says so

The page carries a reconciliation check. If assets ever fail to equal liabilities plus equity, you get a banner rather than a quietly wrong number. In normal operation you will never see it — that is the point of surfacing it.

Reading the report

The report renders as three sections — Assets, Liabilities, and Equity — each an expandable tree that mirrors the structure you designed in your chart of accounts. Categories roll up their children; control accounts and template accounts sit at the leaves with their own balances.

That means the report is only as readable as the structure behind it. A ledger whose accounts are named for their whole path, or that files held funds under income, produces a balance sheet that is accurate and still hard to read. Structure is a reporting decision.

As-of date — the instant the snapshot is taken. It lives in the URL, so a particular view is shareable.
Show archived accounts — off by default, so accounts you have retired stay out of the way until you want them.
Charts — each side can be viewed as a bar or pie breakdown, for when the question is proportion rather than amount.

Retained earnings is computed, not posted

Traditional accounting systems close the books at period end by posting journal entries that sweep income and expenses into equity. Ledfra does not do that — the ledger is append-only and never rewrites history to mark a boundary.

Instead, retained earnings is computed: it is every income entry minus every expense entry, since inception, folded into the equity side at read time. The consequence is worth stating plainly, because it is a real advantage: your balance sheet and your profit & loss agree by construction. They cannot drift, because the same entries produce both, and neither depends on a closing job having run.

Watching it move day by day

A single snapshot tells you where you stand; it does not tell you how you got there. The page also plots a day-by-day series of the same figures, so you can see assets climbing, a liability draining as you pay it down, or the day something jumped. Click a day in the chart and the report re-renders as of that day.

All of this is timezone-aware. A team in New York and a team in Tokyo each see the ledger rolled up by their own calendar day, from the same underlying entries — the backend stores instants in UTC and the boundary is applied at read time.

Limitations

What this report does not do

Figures come from a continuously refreshed rollup of your entries, not a re-sum of the whole ledger on every request. A posting appears within about a minute rather than instantly.
It is available in the app, not the API. The public REST API today covers ledgers, accounts, account balances, and transactions. There is no balance sheet endpoint yet.
There is no cash flow statement. Ledfra ships a balance sheet, a profit & loss, a trial balance, and a daily activity report — that is the full set.
One ledger at a time. There is no multi-entity consolidation and no rollup across ledgers.
No accounting-standard automation. Ledfra will not produce GAAP- or IFRS-compliant statements for you, and does not automate accruals, prepayments, or depreciation. It gives your accountant a correct, complete, auditable book to work from.
A ledger holds a single currency, so the statement is single-currency too.

Where to go next

Profit & loss — the performance half of the picture, over a period rather than an instant.
Trial balance — the proof that every debit has a matching credit.
Chart of accounts design — the structure this report renders.
What is Ledfra? — how the ledger underneath works.