Preparing the annual report

Once the books are tidy, open Reports → Annual Reports, find the year, and click Prepare Annual Report. Arvello reads your ledger and assembles the full report — balance sheet, income statement, notes, and a draft management report — in the XBRL structure the Business Register requires, with prior-year figures alongside for comparison.

What you get isn't a blank form; it's a finished draft waiting for review.

Micro or small — and why it matters

Estonian law sizes the report to the company, and Arvello classifies yours automatically from the figures. A company stays a micro enterprise unless it exceeds at least two of three thresholds — €450,000 in total assets, €900,000 in revenue, or 10 employees — at which point it becomes a small enterprise. One borderline year doesn't flip the category: the criteria have to point the same way at two consecutive year ends.

The category decides which forms the register expects. A micro enterprise files a condensed balance sheet with six standard notes; a small enterprise files the detailed balance sheet with up to twelve notes plus a management report. The category appears as a badge on the report page.

What's filled in automatically

• Balance sheet and income statement — calculated from your trial balance and mapped onto the register's reporting lines, prior-period comparatives included.
• Notes — drafted for you: accounting policies, off-balance-sheet liabilities, secured liabilities, loans to management, treasury shares, and employee count, with six more for small enterprises (fixed asset movements, related-party transactions, and so on).
• Management report — the tegevusaruanne, a short narrative about the year, drafted in Estonian and English from your company's data: main activity, revenue and how it moved against last year, the year's profit or loss, and headcount. Small enterprises must include one; a micro enterprise needs it only when net assets have fallen below the statutory minimum — Arvello flags this on the Management Report tab if it applies.

What you review and edit

The report page has a tab for each part: Balance Sheet, Income Statement, Notes, Management Report, Profit Distribution, and Validation. Click any note, or the management report text, to edit it. Your edits are kept even if you later click Recalculate from Books — recalculating refreshes the figures without overwriting what you wrote.

The Profit Distribution tab records what happens to the year's result: how much goes to dividends, to reserves, or stays retained. Arvello shows the total available for distribution, checks your allocations against the Commercial Code's net-asset rules, and estimates the corporate income tax a dividend would carry. These amounts get typed into the register's portal during submission, so settling them now saves a round trip later.

Validation

The Validation tab shows the structural checks at a glance: the balance sheet balances (assets equal liabilities plus equity), the income statement's net profit agrees with the balance sheet, and the required figures are present. A fuller validation pass runs when you download the XBRL file — covering things like the reporting period's validity and whether prior-year figures line up with the previous report. Errors block the download until fixed; warnings (net assets below the Commercial Code minimum, for instance) are shown for attention but don't stop you.

One habit worth forming: fixes happen in the books, not in the report. The report is a projection of your ledger, so when a number is wrong, correct the underlying record — the reconciliation, the invoice, the journal entry — and click Recalculate from Books. Editing the output would only paper over a problem still sitting in your accounts.

Common questions

The figures look wrong

The usual suspect is reconciliation: unmatched bank transactions leave the ledger, and therefore the report, adrift from reality. The next is opening balances — if your history was imported or entered at onboarding, check the starting figures (see Import your financial history). Fix, recalculate, compare again.

Validation keeps failing

A balance sheet that won't balance almost always points to incomplete bookkeeping rather than a report problem — typically unreconciled transactions or opening balances that never balanced in the first place. Read the specific message, fix the underlying data, and recalculate. And mind the difference between the two severities: warnings are advisories, while errors must be cleared before the XBRL file will download.