What is the Draft Accounts page for?

A draft set of accounts from the books as they stand — a P&L and balance sheet for one company, a holding company with its subsidiaries, or the whole group — at any date, with comparative years, draft-only adjustments, the supporting schedules a lender asks for, and the notes and narrative the data itself requires. The accounts team sets it up in the panel, previews it beside the settings, saves it, issues it as a PDF and compares later issues with the live figures. It is a draft for the accountant, the bank or the board: the statutory accounts are prepared and filed by the accountant in their own software, and nothing here is submitted anywhere. You enter: What and when: the scope (whole group, a sub-group from the Company Structure chart, or one company), the balance sheet date, and how many prior years to compare with; Pages in the pack: the format (Management, or Statutory in the Companies Act layout with a director's report and notes), the detail level, the supporting schedules (trade creditors, trade debtors, intercompany loans), the extra pages (cash flow statement, key ratios and covenants), whether to consolidate, and whether the prior year shows the signed figures; Adjustments: balanced draft journals — a debit account, a credit account, an amount and a narration — or an imported multi-line journal; Narrative and disclosures, the cover and the commentary: edited over the generated wording; a title for the draft. Saral fills: Every statement line from the ledger's cached P&L and balance sheet snapshots, freshened against the books when a recent month is still being written up, with the P&L-to-balance-sheet tie-out shown rather than hidden; The consolidation's three eliminations — the agreed part of each intercompany balance, matched intercompany sales and bills net of VAT, and each parent's investment against its share of the subsidiary's capital — with anything that does not agree left in and listed; The checks a reader makes first and the notes the data requires (director loans, intercompany agreement, WIP staleness, going concern facts), the drafted commentary that says what moved and by how much, the related-party and post-balance-sheet wording from the audit papers, and the fixed-asset and loan notes from the registers; The suggestions behind a figure — intercompany counterparties, WIP and accrued costs — each with its evidence, accepted or declined by you. It produces: A PDF pack (branded management pack, or the statutory layout without an auditor's report) and the same pack as an Excel workbook; saved drafts to reopen; issued copies that stay as sent, compared line by line with the live figures later; A draft manual journal in the company's own ledger from an accepted WIP or accrued-cost suggestion — saved as a draft there, never approved by Saral. Where the settings live: The scope, dates, pages, adjustments and wording are settings of each draft, kept with it on this page. The financial year is Settings → Organisation → Financial year; the accounts a consolidation leaves out are Accounts → Settings → GL Exclusions; the P&L layout is Accounts → Settings → P&L Mapping; the ownership chart a sub-group follows is Accounts → Company Structure; the signed figures are Accounts → Signed Accounts; the company's name and logo are Settings → Company profile.