Financial statements & KPIs

The financial statements AION ships

Statement	What it answers	Menu
Trial Balance	Every account’s debit/credit position	GL → Reports → Trial Balance
Income Statement	Revenue, costs, profit for a period	GL → Reports → Income Statement
Balance Sheet	Assets, liabilities, equity at a date	GL → Reports → Balance Sheet
Cash Flow Statement	Operating, investing, financing cash movements	GL → Reports → Cash Flow
Statement of Changes in Equity	Equity movements during the period	GL → Reports → Equity
Budget vs. Actual	Planned vs. what happened	GL → Reports → Budget vs. Actual

Every statement:

• Available in Arabic + English side-by-side
• Exportable to Excel, PDF, XML
• Drillable to source documents (click any number → see the journal entries behind it → click a JE → see the source transaction)
• Support multi-currency (translate to reporting currency automatically)
• Support multi-ledger (IFRS + local GAAP in separate ledgers, same source transactions)

Multi-ledger = multi-standard reporting

Most real businesses need two views of their financials:

• IFRS for lenders, investors, consolidated reports
• Local GAAP (Saudi, Egyptian, etc.) for tax and statutory filing

These often differ on things like:

• Revenue recognition timing
• Depreciation methods
• Lease treatment (IFRS 16 capitalizes operating leases; local GAAP may not)
• Inventory valuation method

AION supports multi-ledger: you maintain your transactions once, and each ledger applies its own accounting rules to produce its own statements. Your IFRS balance sheet and your Saudi GAAP balance sheet both tie to the same underlying transactions but show different totals because the rules differ.

Compliance reports

Beyond core statements:

• VAT Return Report — input/output VAT summary, ready for ZATCA/ETA filing
• WHT Report — withholding tax by supplier for tax authority reporting
• Zakat Calculation — basis for Zakat tax (Saudi Arabia)
• Audit Trail Report — every GL change, by user, by timestamp
• Period Close Report — which close tasks ran, when, by whom, with what output

KPIs every finance team should watch

Liquidity

KPI	Target	Source
Cash ratio	> 0.3	(Cash + Equivalents) / Current Liabilities
Current ratio	> 1.2	Current Assets / Current Liabilities
Cash conversion cycle	< 90 days	DSO + DIO − DPO

Profitability

KPI	Target	Source
Gross margin %	Industry benchmark	(Revenue − COGS) / Revenue
EBITDA margin %	Industry benchmark	EBITDA / Revenue
Net income margin %	Industry benchmark	Net Income / Revenue

Efficiency

KPI	Target	Source
Inventory turnover	6-12x/year (F&B)	COGS / Avg Inventory
AR turnover	> 8x/year	Revenue / Avg AR
Asset turnover	> 1.5x	Revenue / Avg Total Assets

Operational

KPI	Target	Source
Days to close	< 3 business days	Period Close Report
Audit adjustments / year	0 material items	External audit report
Subledger-to-GL tie breaks	0	Subledger reconciliation report
Manual JEs / month	< 10	GL Manual JE Report

Budget vs. Actual

Every budget line can be tagged to an account, cost center, operating unit, and period. AION compares actuals against budget in real time. Variance reports show:

• Dollar variance — how much over/under budget
• % variance — relative magnitude
• Favorable / unfavorable — with sign convention (revenue over budget = favorable; expense over budget = unfavorable)

The real-dollar ROI

Before AION (typical F&B factory, 20M SAR revenue)

• Close takes 10-15 days. Means 3-month-old financials 45% of the time. Decisions on stale data.
• Audit adjustments: 5-15 items, 5,000-15,000 SAR in adjustment entries per year
• Finance team size: 4-5 people to handle the close workload
• Owner + lender reports: built in Excel, one view of truth

After AION

• Close in 2 days. Financials fresh by day 3 every month. Variance analysis same week.
• Audit adjustments: 0-2 items typically (and usually advisory, not substantive)
• Finance team size: 2-3 people handle the same workload — or the same team has capacity for analysis
• Reports auto-generate in the system; no Excel copy-paste

Typical recurring benefit: 2 FTE capacity freed for analysis (~200,000 SAR value) + 20-50K SAR in avoided audit adjustments + the strategic value of decisions made on 3-day-old data instead of 30-day-old data.

What you should do now

1. Do the March close lab in Lesson 4 if you haven’t.
2. Open the Trial Balance and Income Statement in the demo. Click around. Drill from a total back to source transactions.
3. Open the Budget vs. Actual report and imagine your own budget structure laid over it.
4. Reach out if you want to talk through your close calendar and what days 3-15 of your next month could look like.

The next course — Hire-to-Retire — covers the HR lifecycle, including payroll (which posts to the GL as part of this close cycle you just learned).