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10 - Fava Dashboards and Reports

Fava provides standard accounting reports. The system also uses fava-dashboards for custom overview pages.

Standard Fava views

View Use for
Balance Sheet Checking assets, liabilities, free funds, PayPal, cash, and project balances.
Income Statement Seeing income and expenses over time.
Account page Inspecting all transactions for one account.
Journal Searching chronological transaction history.
Query Running custom Beancount queries when needed.
Documents Finding linked receipts and files.

Dashboard extension

The ledgers include this directive:

2010-01-01 custom "fava-extension" "fava_dashboards"

This activates the dashboard extension if fava-dashboards is installed.

Dashboard configuration files

Dashboard files are named dashboards.yaml. They are stored near the ledger files and at the shared bookkeeping level.

Main dashboard sections

Dashboard Purpose
Vorstand-Cockpit Management overview: free money, total Sparkasse balance, PayPal, cash, liquidity trend, monthly result, active project balances.
Details & Daten Detailed charts: expenses by category, income by category, money flow, project/person network.

Important dashboard indicators

Freies Geld

Shows money available outside restricted project funds. Typical accounts are Vermoegen:Bank:Sparkasse-NICA:Freies-Geld and Vermoegen:Bank:Sparkasse-Tohuwabohu:Freies-Geld.

Sparkasse Gesamt

Shows the total Sparkasse balance across the main bank account and internal subaccounts.

PayPal

Shows PayPal balance. A negative PayPal balance indicates something should be checked.

Barkasse

Shows cash box balance.

Saldo Aktiver Projekte

Shows non-zero project balances. This is useful for seeing which projects still hold money or are overspent.

Monatlicher Ueberschuss / Fehlbetrag

Shows monthly operating surplus or deficit, excluding project accounts in the dashboard query.

How to use dashboards responsibly

Dashboards are summaries. If a number looks surprising:

  1. Click into the linked Fava account or report.
  2. Inspect the underlying transactions.
  3. Check whether a transaction is still in Sonstiges or Bank Dump.
  4. Check whether the account name matches the dashboard query pattern.
  5. Confirm balance checks before trusting management numbers.

When dashboard numbers look wrong

Common causes:

  • A transaction was booked to the main bank account instead of the project subaccount.
  • A project account was closed but still has a non-zero balance.
  • A new project uses a naming pattern not included in the dashboard query.
  • A transaction is still in a broad fallback category.
  • The dashboard file belongs to a different ledger than the one currently opened.