Reporting Overview

Reporting is where you step back from day-to-day planning work and look at what the data is actually showing you.

Income Planning helps you decide what future income should do. Reporting helps you review whether that plan still makes sense after money lands, categories move, and spending patterns become real.

Open the Reports page when you want to answer questions like these:

• Is cash actually flowing the way I expected when I planned the month?
• Which income sources are doing the most work?
• Which categories or payees are driving spending right now?
• How do current results compare across multiple months or years?

The Reports page is organized into five top-level sections: Cash Flow, Spending, Income, Review, and Saved Reports.

Cash Flow #

Cash Flow is the best report when you want to understand movement instead of just totals.

Use it when you want to see how income turns into expenses, savings, and leftover net flow. This is useful after you build a plan, because it helps you confirm whether the month is behaving the way you expected.

Cash Flow supports two main views:

• Sankey for flow-style diagrams from income into expense and savings buckets
• Trend for income, expenses, and net results over time

Depending on the view, you can break the report down by Group, Category, Group + Category, or Label.

Income #

Income focuses on where money is coming from.

This is the report to use when you want to review paychecks, side income, or other inflows after they are recorded. It is especially helpful when you are comparing what you expected in Income Planning to what actually arrived.

Income supports two main views:

• Breakdown for the current split of income sources
• Over Time for income trends across the selected date range

You can organize Income reports by Source, Payee, or Account.

Spending #

Spending focuses on where money went.

Use it after planning and assigning money to see which categories, groups, or payees are actually using the budget. This is often the next step after reviewing whether your planned category amounts were realistic.

Spending supports two main views:

• Breakdown for current spending distribution
• Over Time for spending trends across time

You can organize Spending reports by Category, Group, or Payee.

Review #

Review is the reporting section for spreadsheet-style comparisons across longer time spans.

Use it when you want to review how categories behave across many months or many years instead of looking at a single snapshot chart.

Review supports two built-in formats:

• Monthly Review for a rolling month-by-month grid
• Yearly Review for a calendar-year comparison grid

This is the best reporting type when you are checking for patterns, seasonality, or whether planning adjustments are improving results over time.

Saved Reports #

Saved Reports stores report setups you want to return to without rebuilding the filters each time.

You can save a report from Cash Flow, Spending, Income, or Review after you pick the section, date range, filters, and display options you want.

In Saved Reports, you can:

• preview a saved report
• open it back into the working report workspace
• rename it
• delete it

If a saved report is already active in the main report workspace, Common Cents can also show Update and Dismiss controls so you can either overwrite the saved setup with the current one or stop treating the current view as that saved report.

Saved reports are shortcuts to report configurations. Deleting a saved report does not delete any transactions or planning data.

See also: Income Planning Overview, Paycheck Planning, and Budget Planning.