1. Cash Accounting vs Accrual Accounting

2. Prerequisites
3. Configuration
4. The Main view

5. The Job Details view

6. Using the WIP Data
7. Clipboard helper
8. Shortcuts
9. Report totals
10. Variances in accruals and deferrals.

The finance report is probably one of the most comprehensive and valuable report in all of wayahead. It is an essential tool for accountants and finance administrators, and particularly important for agencies who do accrual accounting.

The report offers the following core features:

To understand the purpose of this report, it is useful to get a basic understanding of what revenue recognition is. If you're an accountant or accounting generally bores you, you can just skip this chapter.

Generally speaking, there are 2 types of accounting that are applied in creative agencies: Cash accounting and Accrual Accounting.

Cash accounting means that you record revenue only when you receive the cash and you record the expense when you pay the bill. While it is a simpler way of working, it can give you a distorted view of the agency's performance. Cash Accounting agencies focus on invoicing and will rely more on wayahead's Forecast report.

The main benefit of the Finance report for you is that it gives you a financial overview for one entire financial year for both your income and forecast and it lets you make changes all from the same screen.

The opposite method, accrual accounting means you record revenue when you earn it and expenses when you incur them, regardless of when the cash actually hits or leaves your bank account. Accrual Accounting agencies will need the Finance report where they can enter the revenue recognition for each job for each month.

The value that is recognised depends on not when an invoice is issued, but rather when the assets are delivered, when milestones are completed or simply on a percentage of the work that was executed.

With accrual accounting, recognising revenue is more of a manual process, where we decide for each job and for each month how much value has been created. Most of the time the recognised value will be linked to an existing (draft) invoice. E.g. an agency can invoice a customer $10,000 in July, but the work is executed in August, September and October. So the income is deferred to 3 future months. In the opposite direction it's called accrued. When the work is delivered before it is invoiced, the invoice amount can be accrued to previous months, meaning you recognise the income before you issue the invoice.

Agencies who work like this will apply manual revenue recognition (see configuration)

Some agencies keep things a lot easier, using a practice where they simply invoice the work they delivered each month. We could consider this a sort of hybrid form of accounting. The benefit is that the billing and revenue recognition are much more aligned and we can assume that the work invoiced is practically the same as the value earned.

These agencies typically only run into one issue: Sometimes their customer requires them to invoice work they haven't delivered. E.g. the customer wants to use up their marketing budget for the financial year and asks the agency to invoice them $20k at the end of December. Over the course of the next months they will commission work to be delivered for that money. In that scenario, the agency will want to defer the income from December to future months.

Agencies who work like this will use automatic revenue recognition (see configuration), recognising each invoice as earned revenue, but they will define accruals and deferrals in wayahead to work around the exceptions. The Finance report was built specifically to make life easier for these agencies. Instead of building complex spreadsheets that are already out of date the minute you save them, you can use this integrated report that lets you combine automated data flows from Streamtime with manual data entry for revenue recognition.

It is important to define the correct start of your company's financial year in the wayahead reporting preferences, because this report shows overviews per financial year.

The report also uses the finance administrator privilege for each wayahead user. Finance Administrators have different access privileges in this report than all other users: they can lock the report when the previous month is closed, so those without authorisation can not make any more changes to the report. But in their role they can overwrite data, even in locked months.

To make someone a finance administrator, just go to the Team Preferences, and click their name in the list of wayahead users. In the modal that pops up, you can tick the option "Financial Admin" on or off.

The Configuration menu at the top of the page is only available for Finance Administrators.

This report can use the data from the Overservice Value report, so that we can work out not just how much work we recorded, but also how much to the recorded time counts as actual billable time. If we spend 12 hours on a task we only sold for 10 hours then we can't include the 2 hours of over servicing in the value produced.

wayahead stored pre-calculated data from the overservice report automatically and loads it up when you view the Finance report. Over service data is stored on 2 occasions:

So if you want accurate WIP data in the Finance report, be sure to have an active Management Report schedule in your setup and if you need the very latest update, then just run the Overservice Value report manually for the current month.

The configuration at the top right of the screen is only available for users who are marked as Finance Administrators for your company (see Team Preferences).

Every agency is looking for different information in the finance report. Some agencies are focused on revenue only, while others value contribution more (revenue - cost of third party services). Some agencies rely heavily on the sales data from quotes, while others only work with the invoices data. Some only accrue or defer income exceptionally – e.g. when a client uses up a marketing budget at the end of the calendar year – while others will bases accruals and deferrals on the WIP data in each job for each month.

The configuration lets you handle which type of data wayahead loads from Streamtime, when each type of data is loaded and what sort of data can be accrued and deferred.

When checking Auto Revenue Recognition, wayahead will automatically count every (draft) invoice, (draft) expense and forecast item as recognised revenue. In other words, this makes your revenue recognition the same as your billing overview (both past and future, so both recognised and forecasted). As a user you can then overwrite the revenue recognition manually for the "exceptions" only. This would be typical for agencies who apply the Modified Cash Basis accounting as explained earlier in this article. $10k invoiced means $10k recognised, unless your enter accruals or deferrals to push the revenue to a different month.

Alternatively you can deselect auto revenue recognition, meaning every value of revenue recognised will be a value manually confirmed by a user. Nothing is recognised unless you say so. This would be typical for agencies who do Accrual Accounting.

When you open up the Finance report, you land on the main list view. This view offers a list of the jobs you've worked on in the selected financial year (this financial year by default). These jobs could still be active (WIP) or already archived – as long as there were invoices, expenses, forecasts, time entries, deferrals or accruals... in the financial year shown, they should also show up (note that this may vary based on the configuration of the report).

The main view displays all data in your home currency, using the exchange rate stored on the job in Streamtime, however if any job in the list is set up in a different currency in Streamtime, the job's currency is highlighted next to the job name:

The main view of the report focuses on income and revenue, but in the backend everything is calculated for you, including the monthly cost and the contribution (income – cost of third party services). Cost and Contribution will only be available if you ask wayahead to load up the Cost (via the configuration) or if you have entered negative forecast amounts via the Billing Forecast report.

At the bottom of the report, you will see a full breakdown of the report by sales, cost and contribution, each time rendered for future forecasted, issued and total projected.

Also as you hover over the numbers in the report, you can see the expenses and the contribution (agency fee) in any given month, like in the example below:

Open the display panel to control the different view modes.

The main view mode determines which numbers are rendered on screen:

By default wayahead will open the report in Billings > Income mode, however it will remember your last view mode, billings or revenue. So if you change it to Revenue Recognition, that's how it will display when you reload.

In each view mode there are a number of choices

In a way, the billings view mode reports is comparable to the Billing Forecast report in wayahead. It focuses on invoices, draft invoices and income forecasts, viewed across one entire financial year.

If you configure the app to also load up the expenses from Streamtime or if you have expense forecasts in wayahead, the report will show not only income, but also the cost figures and the contribution (invoice - cost of third party), sometimes also referred to as agency fee.

In the Billings mode, the main columns show each job's budget, how much has already been invoiced, how much more is forecasted and what the total sum is of invoice + forecasted. These columns are similar to what you see in the billing Forecast report.

The 12 months of the year will display the (forecasted) income for each month of the year.

Values displayed in black at the top of the cell represent issue invoices. Gray values display draft invoices or forecast items, totalled up for each job for each month.

In case you have a draft invoice or forecast in a month in the past, it is marked in red with a strike-through. 3 ways to fix this:

You can hover over the values in each cell to get more details about what the values represent. The tooltip that appears will show the breakdown between forecasted, draft invoices and issued invoices. If your Finance report contains costs it will also show forecasted, draft and issued expenses as well as the corresponding contribution.

The revenue recognition mode shows not the money you have invoiced, but the money you have earned. These amounts are the accumulated total of values you manually entered against each job and each month OR they match the values of your invoices, forecasts and expenses if you have have Auto Recognise Revenue enabled in the configuration.

In the revenue recognition mode, the main columns change slightly, because we focus on different information. In this view you'll see Budget, Invoiced, Recognised and Variance.

The variance is the difference between how much we have invoiced and how much we have recognised against each job. In the example below, we have billed the customer £10k, but we didn't recognise that amount. Hence the variance is -£10k and flagged in red (red is bad).

Another example shows that we have invoiced £30k but we have already recognised £60k, that's a variance of roughly +£30k. A positive variance is flagged in yellow (yellow is... also bad actually, just different, hence another colour).

Only if the invoice total and the recognised total is equal, is the variance 0 and is the job fully set up correctly.

Note that for some jobs the Recognised cell displays a yellowish background colour, while for other jobs it doesn't. That happens when you use Auto Recognise Revenue. In the example below, the £20k for the first job was recognised fully automatically be wayahead, based on the corresponding invoices.

The second job, with the yellow background, tells me someone manually entered accruals or deferrals for this job, so whatever value we're seeing was defined by a user and not by the system.

The WIP view mode will be available only if you get wayahead to load the WIP data in report mode via the configuration:

The goal of the WIP mode is to get some context around the production data on the job, so if you enter accruals and deferrals against the job, at least you can see how those amounts compare to the progress of the job itself.

In the main columns you'll see the total planned value (based on the job items), the logged value (based on completed timesheets), the overservice value (based on the overservice data stored in wayahead from the Overservice report) and the WIP value.

The WIP value is calculated as:

Total time logged

+ Total time scheduled (current + future months)

- Total time overserviced (current + past months)

So let's say we recorded $9k so far this month. Today is the 21st and we still have $2k scheduled as todo's before the month is over. But out of the $9k recorded, wayahead has worked out that $3k is overserviced (we recorded $3k more than the tasks we worked on were worth). That makes the WIP value $9k + $2k - $3k = $8k.

Of course, for months in the past, the scheduled work is ignored. If we didn't complete those todo's, we don't want to include them in our WIP value. Similarly, overservice doesn't apply to future months.

If we intend to base the revenue recognition on the value produced, then the WIP data is the most important indicator for our finances.

You can hover over the value in each job, each month to get an accurate breakdown of the WIP value as well as a breakdown of the overservice data.

Overservice data can not be calculated on the fly in the Finance report, it requires individual todo's, job items, job item assignments and much more, which could mean fetching tens of thousands of records from Streamtime. Loading this data on the fly would make the report too slow to load.

So instead, wayahead loads the overservice data that is stored in the wayahead database, making it almost instant to load.

The overservice data is stored in the database on 2 occasions:

So the idea is that the overservice data is automatically updated in the database at the end of every month, with no action required. In case you wish to see overservice to-date for the current month, you can just run the report on screen and wayahead will store an updated version of the data for you.

Similarly, in case the overservice data should change for certain months in the past, e.g. because you updated some job labels, then you can just run the report on screen going back as far as you like. It may take a while to fetch and calculate the data, but once it's ready, that data is stored and used in the Finance report again.

Note that you can toggle the view mode between the three main ones using shortcuts, just press

b – billing mode

r – revenue recognition mode

w – WIP totals mode

If you like, you can change how the job summary data is displayed, as numbers or as a chart.

Just use the toggle in the display panel to modify how the main columns are shown:

By default, wayahead will display the key numbers for your job. These are pretty self explanatory:

Sometimes it's just easier to spot abnormalities if you can visualise the data as numbers. Note that rendering charts for every job in the list can be rather slow. So wayahead has a limit on how many jobs can be shown when you display the charts. When more than 150 jobs are shown, wayahead will show an error message and switch (back) from Chart to Finances. If you have over 150 jobs listed in one financial year, you can just use the filters to shorten the list first before you render the charts.

In the chart, the yellow bar in the background represents the job budget. Then, just like in the Forecast report, green represents income and blue represents cost. You can see bars stacked up together in 3 colours, representing issued, draft and forecasted invoices/expenses.

Just hover over the chart to see a detailed tooltip with all the numbers:

Once the revenue recognition for a past month is defined, we don't want to change it anymore. While we allow account managers to enter the value recognised for the current and future months, we don't want them modifying the revenue figures for past months.

Users will see which months they can still edit and which months are locked. Both in the main view and the detail view of the job, the locked months show with a lock icon in the header cell and the locked months are graded out. Once a month is locked, the user can not enter new values or modify existing values for revenue recognition.

If you are a finance administrator (as configured in the wayahead Team Preferences), you will see a button at the top of the report to change the lock date:

When you click it, you can choose the move the lock date forward by 1 month or backward by 1 month:

When you open the report for the first time, it is automatically set to lock at the last month of the last financial year.

While regular users can never modify data in locked months, finance administrators can. Regardless of the lock, they always have the ability to make modifications if necessary, so that they gain full control over the numbers in the report.

Note that the locking mechanism only allows you to go forward or backward one month at a time. However if the lock date for your report is more than 3 months in the past, wayahead will give you the option to jump forward into time so you don't have to keep clicking +1, +1, +1,... to catch up.

This report has several ways to search and filter. There is a plain Search field at the top right of the page, which will search through job names, customer names, job labels job leads, job types, branch, PO number and even job currency.

You can also click the Filter icon to the left of the search field to get an advanced filter set and combine different filters.

When including job labels in the search request, you can even choose if those specific labels have to be included or excluded from the search, E.g. show all jobs that are not labeled as "Retainer"

To quickly select specific job leads, branches, job types or job status, just press the alt-key to select or deselect all.

The totals in the footer will recalculate every time you apply a search or filter.

If you configured Forecast Tiers in the wayahead forecast report, you'll find they are automatically implemented in the Finance report.

Forecast tiers are mostly used to add a probability to upcoming work, by adding specific job labels in Streamtime.

In the billing Forecast report's configuration you can set up your tears with a name, corresponding labels, a colour and a probability:

Jobs with a specific Tier label are automatically colour coded in the list view of the Finance report, in exactly the same way as in the Forecast report.

All job values will be multiplied with the related probability in the list view, but when you look at the job details, you will see the original unweighted values of the job.

In the detail view you will see a label representing the Forecast Tier (or the default fallback value for jobs without a label) in the top right corner of the page.

The report data can be exported in 3 different ways: as PDF, as CSV or as a CSV summary. The output values are the same as those displayed on screen, depending on the view mode. The CSV summary outputs all the footer rows as a financial year summary of the report.

The PDF output will follow the same display options from the screen. So if you filtered your jobs for 1 job lead and your jobs are grouped by client, showing pills instead of numbers, then that's exactly how the PDF will come out.

While the default view of the main table is an overview of all jobs, you can choose to summarise the data in one of the following ways.

In the symmary, wayahead will display the key name and the number jobs included in that summary.

If you have issue tracking enabled in the configuration, your jobs list might show a warning on certain jobs. The types of warnings are indicated with one of 3 icons.

Hover over over the icon to see what type of warning it is.

If you click the warning icon, a modal pops up listing all the issues wayahead found in that job:

In the job details view we can edit the revenue recognition data and see more details about the job and its financial status. To see the job details, just click anywhere on the job row (except the job name and job lead columns)

While the main jobs list always displays everything in the home currency of your company, the job details shows everything in its original currency. The job header is shown in the job currency. Invoices and expenses are shown in their respective currencies. So you may find a mix of different currencies on this page. The key thing is that values are displayed in the values we can relate to. We want an invoice inside the job showing as US$8,500, not as €7,296.40, because Euro happens to be our home currency.

There's no need to go back to the list view to see the next job, you can just click the previous and next buttons in at the top right of the page.

The configuration options determine if any data still needs to be loaded while opening up the job details, as well as what information is shown in this page.

At the top of the page you can see the job summaries. The key information here is to see a comparison between billings, revenue recognition and work in progress. E.g. At the end of the job, there should be no difference between what we invoiced and what we recognised. For any deviations you are expected to take action and update the numbers.

The top left of the page shows you the job summary. Like most reports, wayahead displays income in green, cost in blue and contribution in yellow.

The summaries can either be show to date (up until the current month) or until the end of the job.

The range changes from "Key figures to date" to "Key figures till end of job" if you click that toggle. But the range also changes as you hover over the charts on the top right of the page.

The top right of the page shows a cumulative line graph of the finances and the WIP. As you hover over one chart, the corresponding values on the second chart will be displayed and the key figures on the left hand panel change.

Once again the next part of the page depends on what you have set up in the configuration. The list shows the following item:

You can use the toggles at the top of this section to show and hide specific line items. Hover over the info panel of each line to see more details.

The date months displayed on the right hand side of the table are NOT the financial year, but the full date range of when your job ran with a few months extra at the start and at the end. A job that covers 2 months would show 6 months. A job that ran for 15 months would show 19 months.

Accruals and deferrals are terms we use to indicate we are pushing income or expenses to a month other than the one they were issued or incurred.

When we recognise revenue before the actual sales date, we say the income is accrued.

When we recognise revenue after the actual invoice date we say the income is deferred.

The whole point of this view and the finance report is to make it easy to enter accruals and deferrals for each job each month.

In the example below, we had an invoice issued on September 22 2025. But we wish to spread the recognised revenue across September and October 25.

So in accountancy terms part of the income is deferred to October, the rest remains in September.

Just click in right month next to your invoice and either enter an amount or a percentage. The amount will be treated as a value in the invoice currency. When wayahead detects the % sign it will take that % of the invoice amount.

In the Recognised column, wayahead automatically calculates the sum of all recognised values over time and displays the variance between the (forecasted) billing and recognised value.

Every time you click a month to enter a new value, the variance is automatically entered for you.

This is determined in the configuration. You just need to check the option in the Revenue Recognition column.

We would recommend only entering accruals and deferrals against invoices and expenses. It's probably not a good idea to start recognising revenue against jobs if you don't even know for sure they will ever get invoiced.

But wayahead does give you the option to also enter them against quotes or even on a job level.

E.g. you have a project that hasn't been signed off yet, then you could already enter the expected revenue on the job line. Then later, when you start to enter invoices on the job, you can migrate the recognised amount from the job level down to the right invoice to make sure the numbers tally up on your final job.

Note that it is never possible to enter accruals or deferrals against wayahead forecast items. That's because forecast items may be deleted in the Forecast report, without the user ever realising they're also deleting the corresponding revenue recognition in the Finance report.

There will be times when you want to modify the related records. This could be updating the date on an overdue draft invoice, draft expense or forecast item. It could be changing the amount of a forecast item or even adding a new forecast item all together.

As you hover over draft or forecast records you'll see the edit button appear. Just click the button:

In the pop up dialog, you'll see the familiar interface from the Forecast report where you can simply drag and drop the invoice, expense or forecast amount into a different month. That way you don't have to switch forth and back between Streamtime and wayahead or between the Finance and the forecast report.

If the record was overdue, the month it is currently in will be shown with a red shading. You can delete forecast items

You can also add new forecast items directly from this screen.

When you open the job details, wayahead automatically loads up your job plan and renders it above your financial relations. This is to help you work out exactly how much revenue or cost you should be entering against each of your invoices and expenses for each month. After all, the revenue we recognise has to match not only with the invoices we issue across the lifespan of the job, but every month we only want to recognise the value we actually produced or plan to produce.

The WIP has 3 elements to it:

LOG: This is the sum of logged or scheduled todo's each month

PLAN: This is the planned value based on job items and their start and due dates

WIP: This value is calculated by wayahead and represents the production value for each month.

For past months, the WIP value usually matches with the value of time entries recorded against each task. When a task is marked as completed, the WIP value includes the remaining value left on the task.
With a simple example, a £1,200 task runs across 3 months and was eventually completed last month.

The first month, we recorded £450, so WIP is £450.

The second month we recorded £100, so the WIP is £100.

Last month we recored another £500 and marked the item as completed. WIP for that month is £650 (and not £500), because that's how much was remaining on this item.
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For future months, wayahead will look at a combination of the scheduled time and the planned time (as calculated by Streamtime).

Whatever the remaining value on an item is, it will be spread equally between today and the end date of the item. However, if in some month, you schedule more work than this equal spread, that value will be taken instead.

With an example: Our £1,200 item is due in 3 months and we've already logged £600 last month. So the remaining time is spread equally across the next 3 months at £200 each.

However, if I schedule in £450 work 2 months from now, then the remaining value is only £150. In that case the WIP will be spread £75, £75, £450.

wayahead will display the WIP, Logged or Planned value for each item, for each phase and for the entire job. However over any month to see a tooltip with more details on how the value was calculated.

You can use the toggle buttons to see monthly totals across the job or cumulative totals. Compare the WIP to billing or revenue and toggle between WIP, Plan or Logged time.

The clipboard helper is a function built into the app, that lets you make calculations and quickly copy values to the clipboard.

If the total WIP for this month is £5,752.50, then that's the value I'll want to recognise against my invoice. Rather than typing in that value manually, I can just click on that number. You'll see it appear in the clipboard input field and you can immediately paste it as an accrual or deferral on an invoice.

If you press the + or the -, you can even click multiple values, one after the other and the app will add them all up or subtract the values automatically.

Finally, you can also type calculations in the clipboard input field. E,g. if you're going to spread a £19,450 quote across 5 months, just type that inside the field. As soon as you hit return, wayahead calculates the result and copies it to your clipboard.

To speed up display and navigation inside the report, a number of shortcuts is available. Different shortcuts apply to the list view and the detail view.

List view shortcuts:

Detail view shortcuts:

Additionally, if you press the back button of the browser while viewing the job details, instead of navigating back to the last web page you were on, wayahead will navigate back to the list view.

At the bottom of the list view, you can see the totals for your financial year. The rows displayed may vary depending on your configuration.

In Yellow you will see Forecasted totals, based on draft records and forecast items

In Blue you see the Issued totals, based on issued invoices and expenses.

In Green you see the Projected totals, adding up the Forecasted + Issued results.

You can also load in the targets. Targets can either come from the wayahead Sales Targets or from Xero's Budget Manager.

The benefit of wayahead's sales targets is that you can set them up as sales targets or as contribution targets (contribution = sales - direct cost of sales).

As you hover over each month, you'll see the monthly target, the variance and the YTD totals and variances.

In the last footer row, wayahead shows you the movements for accruals and deferrals across each month. In the example below we're looking at March 2026.

Out of the £204k that was billed in March, £164k was deferred or accrued to different month.

At the same time, £133k that was billed in other months was deferred or accrued into March.

The total variance between Billing and Recognised revenue this month is £43k (£204k-£160,452)

If you click the number, a modal pops up with the full breakdown of all values included in each of these numbers. You can choose to see all accruals and deferrals across all jobs or only those relating to March:

In the modal, you get a list of all jobs with their original billing date and the related accruals and deferrals and you can use the search field to find specific jobs in the list.