Every balance sheet you'll ever see is headed something like "as at 28 February 2027". Every income statement is headed "for the year ended 28 February 2027".
The difference between as at and for the period isn't bookkeeping pedantry. It's the reason two reports can both be right and show different numbers, and it's usually the answer when a figure appears on one screen and not another.
A photograph and a video
A balance sheet is a photograph. It shows what you own and what you owe at one instant. It has no duration — only a date. Your bank balance "as at" the 28th is a single number, not a range.
An income statement is a video. Revenue and expenses only mean something over a stretch of time. "Revenue of R400,000" is meaningless until you say over what — a month, a year.
That's why the two reports are dated differently, and it's not a styling convention. It follows from what the numbers are.
Which reports are which
Point in time — "as at":
- Balance Sheet
- Trial Balance
- Age analysis (debtors and creditors)
- Stock valuation
Over a period — "for the period":
- Profit & Loss / Income Statement
- Cash Flow Statement
- VAT return
- Budget versus actual
A useful way to keep them straight: if the number resets to zero at the start of a new year, it's a period report. Revenue resets each year. Your bank balance doesn't.
Why this decides what shows up
Here's where it bites in practice.
A document dated after your "as at" date is not part of that photograph. An invoice dated 31 October simply isn't in the picture of what you were owed on 23 October — because on the 23rd, you weren't owed it yet.
So a debtors report as at the 23rd will not include it. A balance sheet as at the 23rd will not include it. The October Profit & Loss will include it, because October as a period contains the 31st.
Two reports, both correct, different answers — because they're answering different questions.
The same logic covers the past. A balance sheet as at 28 February includes every transaction up to that day and nothing after it, no matter when you captured them. Capture a February invoice in April and your February balance sheet changes, because the photograph was always of February; you've only just finished developing it.
When no date is given
If a report doesn't ask you for a date, it should mean today — not "everything, forever".
This sounds obvious and it's the single easiest thing for software to get subtly wrong. A balance sheet with no upper date limit will quietly include documents dated next week, while still calling itself "as at today". The figure isn't wrong by much, and that's what makes it dangerous — it's wrong in a way that looks plausible.
If you ever suspect it, there's a straightforward test: run the same report twice, once with today's date typed in explicitly and once with the date field left alone. They should give the same answer. If they don't, the blank one isn't really "as at today".
"Today" in which country?
One more trap, and a genuinely South African one.
Servers usually run on UTC. South Africa is UTC+2. Between midnight and two in the morning, SAST is already tomorrow while UTC is still yesterday.
If a system computes "today" in UTC, then anything captured in that two-hour window gets dated the previous day. Most of the time that's a curiosity. On the 1st of a month it is not: a document captured at half past midnight on 1 November gets dated 31 October, which puts it in the previous month and the previous VAT period.
For a South African business, "today" has to mean the South African date. If you do any work late at night, it's worth checking that the date your system puts on a document matches the date on your wall.
Reading two reports that disagree
When the dashboard says one thing and a report says another, work through this:
1. Are they the same kind of report? A period figure and a point-in-time figure are not comparable. Revenue this month and debtors right now are different animals. 2. Do they cover the same dates? Year to date is not this month. 3. Is something dated in the future? A document ahead of today will sit in some views and not others, depending on how each one handles dates. 4. Does one include drafts? It shouldn't. Drafts post nothing. 5. Does one include reversed entries? A reversal leaves the original in the ledger and posts a mirror. Both must be counted, or the correction shows up without the thing it corrected — and the figure goes negative.
Most disagreements are number 2 or number 3.
The short version
As at is a photograph of one day. For the period is a video of a stretch of time. A document dated after your "as at" date isn't in the photograph yet — it isn't lost, it's just not that day's news.
And when a report says "as at today", it should mean today where you are.