Your financial datasets and their business context

Every organization starts with these three, prepared from your ERP. Together they hold the activity, the balances, and the account structure behind the financial statements. This includes the accounting entries behind sales, bills, and payments, along with balances such as cash, what customers owe you, and what you owe suppliers.

General Ledger Lines holds activity and Trial Balance holds positions. A balance is a value at a date, so it is read for one period and never added across periods. To explain why a balance changed, read the activity in General Ledger Lines.

This dataset explains changes in cash from daily operations, buying or selling long-term assets, and transactions with lenders or owners.

This is the evidence behind the Cash Flow Statement. Accounts are classified as operating, investing, or financing under rules your controller reviews.

These datasets bring together each project's income and costs, debt and equity funding activity, costs capitalized as project assets, and purchase-order commitments, so you can assess how it is financed and where costs are accumulating.

Project Overview is the first stop for a question about project health. Its presentation follows the industry set for your organization.

Units are the quantities your business counts beside its money, such as projects in progress or units sold. These datasets draw on your team's Unit Register entries and supported NetSuite quantity records, reported alongside financial figures. You can follow those counts over time to see what was added, sold, completed, or still in progress.

Reporting Entity Metrics is an additional dataset for KPI, ratio, and company performance reporting. It brings selected Finance Catalog metrics together for individual Legal Entities and the configured group of companies, with results anchored at month-end.

In BI Sharing - Metrics Settings, select the Legal Entities to include and choose the reporting scope:

• Per Legal Entity: deliver a separate result for each selected Legal Entity.
• Combined organization: calculate one combined result across exactly the selected Legal Entities.
• Both: deliver the individual results and the combined result in the same dataset.

These source settings apply to every metric selected for Reporting Entity Metrics. Combined ratios use the combined underlying amounts rather than an average of company ratios.

With Both, BI reports can show the companies and the combined group side by side, using reporting scope as a series or filter. Keep individual and combined results separate when displaying totals. A scorecard selects one metric, one reporting scope, and one month-end; a trend uses month-end as its date dimension.

Delivery is configured through BI sharing. See metric activation and delivery for the settings and the distinction between an active definition and the revision actually delivered.

These are shaped for dashboards and delivered to BI tools such as Google Data Studio, Power BI, and Tableau. Identities follow your BI privacy settings. An organization receives the sources it has requested and configured. In a BI tool each appears under the table name shown.

A report is a calculation over a dataset, prepared by PipeLedger and returned with its evidence. Three are financial statements. A Metrics Report is an ordered selection of governed metrics that you choose, one line per metric, and is not a financial statement.

A question about a single month or quarter is answered by querying General Ledger Lines or Trial Balance.

PipeLedger's financial ontology is its governed model of financial concepts, business objects, and their relationships. Accounts, Legal Entities, customers, suppliers, employees, and projects share a consistent vocabulary across supported ERPs, with source references retained.

Governed identity links distinguish a real-world party from its separate ERP records. Business roles, project and customer relationships, reporting groups, and recorded ownership retain their own meanings. Versioned metric definitions specify what a figure measures and how it is calculated. Together these give authorized applications a financial semantic layer to query and interpret.

The Business Object Directory makes those identities, roles, and relationships available to agents. Entity Context adds dated company profiles and ownership facts to that model. Your ERP remains the system of record for financial actuals.

The Business Object Directory gives agents the business relationships behind the ledger. This part of PipeLedger's financial ontology connects customers, vendors, employees, projects, and Legal Entities to their source records, reporting identities, governed roles, and supporting evidence. An agent can establish who a question concerns, how the records are related, and which financial activity to investigate.

• Source records and reporting identities: retain the ERP, connection, and original record identifier. Approved links can bring corresponding records of the same type together for reporting across connected accounting systems, while preserving each source reference.
• Real-world business identities: evidence-backed identity links can connect Customer, Vendor, and Employee records to the same person or organization. This lets an agent recognize a party represented in more than one register while keeping its sales, purchases, and employment records distinct.
• Governed business roles: record the relationship your team has asserted for an exact Customer, Vendor, or Employee record. Roles include supplier, contractor, lender, partner, reseller, distributor, agent, tax authority, and reimbursement payee. Each assertion carries its own identifier and evidence reference, independently of an optional business identity. A Vendor record can therefore represent a lender rather than a supplier.
• Relationships and management groupings: expose available source relationships such as project-to-customer, employee-to-supervisor, and parent records. Controller-defined corporate families group distinct Customers or Vendors for management reporting. A family membership keeps its own meaning; it does not establish common identity or legal ownership.

From a business question to ledger evidence

pl_resolve can search names, aliases, exact identifiers, roles, and corporate families; list authorized objects; and review source evidence for Customers, Vendors, and Employees. Results explain the match and distinguish recorded assertions from advisory ERP signals. Similar names or search scores never create an identity link or business role.

For example, an assistant investigating payments to a lender can resolve the Vendor, inspect its asserted role and evidence, follow a returned relationship with another resolver lookup, and use its exact identifier in pl_query to examine ledger activity. It can also start with a transaction and resolve the counterparty found there. Entity Context supplies separately published legal, tax, and ownership facts when needed.

Governed assertions, protected financial facts

Identity links and role assertions retain evidence, effective dates, versions, and an audit history of corrections and retractions. Authorized governance workflows manage changes; resolver lookups are read-only. Search reflects current identity, role, and permitted corporate-family governance over published source records. Financial datasets incorporate those changes through their next successful publication.

Directory results follow the connection's dataset permissions, entity and segment scope, and identity privacy rules. Private identities use stable privacy tokens. Linking reporting records preserves ledger row counts and amounts, with pipeline checks testing that enrichment does not duplicate or lose financial activity.

Good accounting depends on understanding who is involved, how companies are related, and which legal and tax facts applied when a transaction occurred. Entity Context gives CPAs, controllers, and authorized AI assistants that background alongside ledger evidence, supporting more informed classification, review, and reporting.

Your team maintains company profiles, reporting groups, and direct ownership interests in Entity Settings and publishes them separately from the General Ledger. The context includes:

• Legal and tax profiles: legal form, formation country, tax jurisdiction and system, and recorded tax classification with its optional basis. Legal form and tax classification remain distinct.
• Dated relationships: reporting-group memberships and direct ownership shares, with the periods in which the recorded facts apply.
• Evidence and history: supporting references, recorded changes, and corrections, with business-effective dates distinguished from when information was entered.

For example, this context helps an assistant assess whether a group payment relates to management services, reimbursement of shared costs, or a subsidiary loan. These are the relationship and purpose questions a CPA considers when deciding how a transaction should be recorded.

Supporting documents and professional judgment establish the final treatment. Entity Context supplies facts for that assessment; it does not calculate tax or arm's-length prices, validate elections, determine consolidation treatment, or change posted ledger amounts.

Agents retrieve the approved context through pl_resolve context lookups for a date or period. Access requires explicit Entity Context and Business Object Directory permissions, Highly Restricted clearance, and permitted original identities. Empty or withheld fields must not be treated as proof that no relationship or classification exists. Entity Context supports these resolver lookups; it is not a direct query or BI table.

• A Legal Entity. Every published General Ledger line carries a Reporting Legal Entity ID and name, so reporting can cover one Legal Entity or every authorized entity.
• A source reference. Ledger lines keep a reference to the ERP record they came from.
• A publication. Each result names the approved publication it was served from. Raw and unpublished data are never served.
• Your access rules. Dataset access, Legal Entity and segment scope, account confidentiality, and identity privacy are applied before a result is returned.

The core datasets are the foundation. Cash flow, projects, units, Entity Context, and BI datasets are data products that are enabled for each organization. Within an organization, each connection sees only the datasets its Owner or Admin has granted. See pricing for current plans.