Run a Spanish SL and you carry obligations a sole trader doesn't. You need to know your profit and loss, your balance sheet, and at year's end your annual accounts (cuentas anuales). These aren't optional nice-to-haves, they're how you understand your own company and meet what's expected of it.
The trouble is that for most small SL owners, these documents live with the gestor and only appear once a year, often too late to be useful and too jargon-heavy to act on. Facturaz changes that by generating them automatically from your bookkeeping, so you can see exactly where your company stands, any time.
Here's what each one is, in plain language, and how Facturaz produces them for you.
Profit & loss: are you actually making money?
Your profit and loss statement (cuenta de resultados) answers the most basic question about your company: over a period, did you make money or lose it?
It takes your income, subtracts your costs, and shows what's left, your profit, or your loss. That's it, in essence. It tells you whether the business is working, and where the money is being made and spent.
What makes it powerful is seeing it regularly instead of once a year. Is this quarter better than last? Are costs creeping up faster than income? Is a price rise actually landing, or being eaten by expenses? A P&L you can look at any time turns these from guesses into facts.
Balance sheet: what your company owns and owes
If the P&L is a film of a period, the balance sheet (balance de situación) is a photo of a single moment. It shows, right now:
- What your company owns (assets), cash in the bank, money clients owe you, equipment.
- What your company owes (liabilities), suppliers, taxes due, loans.
- What's left over for the owners (equity), the difference between the two.
The balance sheet is what a bank wants to see before lending, what an investor checks before investing, and what tells you whether your company is genuinely solid or just busy. A business can be making sales and still be fragile if it owes more than it owns, the balance sheet is where that shows up.
Annual accounts: your company's yearly story
The cuentas anuales are the formal year-end picture of your company, pulling the P&L, the balance sheet and supporting detail into the set of accounts an SL is expected to prepare each year.
This is the document the bank asks for, the one a potential partner or buyer wants to see, and the one that represents your company officially. Having it accurate and ready, rather than scrambled together at the last minute, is part of looking like the serious business you are.
How Facturaz generates all three for you
Here's the shift. Because Facturaz already holds your invoices, expenses and transactions, it can build these statements from your real data, automatically, instead of you, or your gestor, assembling them by hand.
Always up to date
Your P&L and balance sheet update in real time as you work. Send an invoice, book an expense, and the statements reflect it. You're never looking at a stale picture from three months ago, you're looking at where your company stands today.
No spreadsheets, no waiting
You don't build these in Excel and you don't wait for someone to send them over. They're generated for you, in the right shape, ready to read. The work that used to mean a request to your gestor and a few days' wait is just there on screen.
Ready when the bank asks
When you need to show your numbers, for a loan, a financier, a partner, your annual accounts and statements are ready to hand over, drawn from your actual bookkeeping. No fire drill, no reconstructing the year from receipts.
Don't like reading statements? Just ask.
Not everyone wants to read a balance sheet, and you don't have to. You can ask GestorIA, the built-in AI assistant, for the same numbers in plain words:
- "Was my company profitable last quarter?"
- "What does my company owe right now?"
- "How does this quarter's profit compare to last?"
You get a straight answer from your real figures, no financial vocabulary required. The formal statements are there when you need them, for the bank, for your records, and the plain-language version is there for the day-to-day.
Worth noting: this ability to just ask for your numbers in chat works for autónomos too, not only SLs. Which leads to one honest clarification.
A note for autónomos
The full P&L, balance sheet and annual-accounts views are built for SLs, because that's where they're genuinely needed. We've deliberately kept them out of the autónomo experience to keep Facturaz as simple as possible for sole traders, who don't carry the same formal accounting obligations and are usually better served by a clean, uncluttered view.
That said, autónomos can still ask GestorIA about their profit, their costs and how periods compare, the insight is there in chat, without the formal statements. And if enough autónomos tell us they want the full reports too, we'll look at adding them. Simplicity is a choice we made for you, not a limit we're attached to.
Why this matters for SL owners
The SLs that thrive are run by owners who know their numbers, not owners who find out how the year went several months after it ended. Real-time financial statements change how you run the company: you spot a margin slipping while you can still fix it, you go into a bank meeting prepared, you make decisions on facts instead of gut feel.
That's the difference between accounts as a yearly chore and accounts as a tool. Facturaz puts them in the second category, and keeps them there with zero extra effort from you.
The bottom line
An SL needs a P&L, a balance sheet and annual accounts, to meet expectations and, just as importantly, to understand itself. Facturaz generates all three automatically from your bookkeeping, always current, ready when the bank asks, and available in plain language through GestorIA whenever you'd rather just ask than read.
Know where your company stands, today, not next spring.
See your company's full financial picture. Start free with Facturaz →
This article is general information about financial statements for Spanish SLs and how Facturaz works. It is not professional accounting or tax advice. The preparation and filing of formal annual accounts can involve requirements specific to your company, confirm them with a qualified professional.