Read your finance overview
What each figure at the top of Finances counts, and what the date range does and doesn't cover.
For group owners and admins · 5 min · Updated 2026-07-30
Five numbers sit at the top of Finances and they are the fastest honest answer to "how is the school doing this month?". Three of them follow the date range you pick; two of them ignore it entirely. Knowing which is which is the whole point of this page.
Before you start
- You need to be owner or admin. Staff can open Finances but the figures row does not appear for them.
- The numbers are only as true as your ledger. A cash payment nobody recorded is invisible here — see Record a payment.
Steps
Open Finances and click Overview
The module opens on Invoices, so Overview is one click away. Overview fetches nothing new — it is a shorter view of data the page already loaded.
The small grey numbers next to Invoices, Transactions, Receipts and Vendors are row counts for what is currently loaded, not all-time totals.
Set the date range
The card under the tabs holds four presets — This month, Last month, Last 3 months, This year — and a From / To pair for any other window. A preset lights up only while the dates match it exactly; type your own dates and none of them is highlighted.
On wide screens the card also prints Showing followed by the two dates, which is worth a glance before you trust a number.
The range applies to every tab except Vendors, where it is hidden.
Read the five figures
| Figure | What it counts | Follows the date range? |
|---|---|---|
| Income | Every income transaction whose date falls in the range | Yes |
| Expenses | Every expense transaction whose date falls in the range | Yes |
| Profit | Income minus Expenses | Yes |
| Pending | The unpaid balance of every Pending and Partial invoice | No |
| Overdue | The unpaid balance of every Overdue invoice | No |
Pending carries the hint Invoices on time and Overdue the hint Overdue invoices.
Two things to hold on to:
- Pending and Overdue sum the balance, not the total. A bill of which part has been paid contributes only what is still owed.
- A Partial invoice stays Partial even after its due date, so its balance lands in Pending — never in Overdue. Do not read Overdue as "all the late money"; read it as "invoices nobody has paid a cent of, past their due date".
Read the two lists
Overview shows two panels side by side.
Pending invoices lists up to five invoices that are Pending, Overdue or Partial, soonest due date first, each with its status dot and amount. When there is nothing to chase it says "No pending invoices". View all takes you to the Invoices tab.
Latest transactions lists up to five movements, newest first, each with a
+ or − and its amount. When the ledger is empty for the range it says "No
transactions recorded". View all takes you to the Transactions tab.
Both lists are filtered by the same date range as everything else, so an empty Latest transactions panel usually means the range, not the school.
What you should see
The five figures in your group's currency, and two short lists. If you just switched the range, the numbers change in place without a spinner.
Above the figures you may also see:
- Filtered by tags: followed by the tags you selected in the Transactions tab. Tag filters narrow Income, Expenses and Profit too, which is easy to forget once you have navigated away from that tab — clear them with Clear if a number looks too small.
- A Currency picker at the top right of the page, with the hint Applies to whatever you charge from now on. Only owners and admins see it.
The date range does not mean the same thing on every tab
This is the single most confusing thing in the module, so it is worth spelling out. The range is compared against a different date depending on what is being listed:
| Tab | Filtered on |
|---|---|
| Invoices | the start of the invoice's period |
| Transactions and Receipts | the date the money moved |
| Overview | both of the above, one per list |
| Tax report | invoiced amounts by invoice period; collected and paid amounts by transaction date |
The practical consequence: an invoice you create by hand in the hub is stamped with today as both the start and the end of its period. So a February bill you type up in April sits in April's range, not February's — while the payment you record against it sits on the day you say the money arrived. If an invoice you know exists is missing from the list, widen the range before you assume anything is broken.
Troubleshooting
Everything reads zero and every list is empty. Check the range first. The default is This month, and a school whose activity is older than that opens on a blank page. Set From and To around the period you actually want.
Income looks too low. Two usual causes: payments that were never recorded as transactions, and a card payment collected through a Stripe link. A payment link marks nothing and writes no ledger entry on its own — see Record a payment.
Profit is negative but the school is fine. Profit is a subtraction of two sums over a window, nothing more. One quarter's hall rent paid in a month where you collected nothing shows exactly that. Widen the range.
The amounts are in a currency I do not use. Each invoice and each transaction stores the currency it was issued in, and the figures row is labelled with the group's current currency. Changing the Currency picker does not convert or rewrite anything that already exists — it only applies to what you charge from then on.