Thank you for your message
It has been sent successfully. If you would prefer to book a meeting right away, choose your preferred time.
06 / 10 / 2026
Pohoda is the most widely used accounting software in Czech companies. Accountants like working in it and work fast. The problem starts when management wants to see the numbers in a different way than by accounting accounts: by cost center, by project, for a group of companies or against the budget. That is when the Excel exports, pivot tables and several days of work after every month-end close begin.
In this article we look at the reporting options available on top of Pohoda, where they hit their limits, and how to build management reporting that updates itself.
Pohoda provides standard accounting reports: income statement, balance sheet, trial balance and overviews of receivables and payables. That is enough for accounting and tax purposes. Management questions are different:
Standard reports do not answer these questions. Stormware, the vendor of Pohoda, offers the POHODA BI module, and there are a number of third-party add-ons. For a single company and basic overviews, that may be enough. Once you add more companies, planning, and sharing numbers outside the accounting team, you usually end up back in Excel.
| Approach | How it works | Where it falls short |
| Excel exports | The accountant or controller exports reports and builds the management report by hand | Repeated every month, risk of errors, multiple versions of the numbers |
| In-house BI (Power BI and similar) | A data model on top of the Pohoda SQL database | Requires an analyst, ongoing model maintenance, chart of accounts changes break the reports |
| Specialized platform | A connector reads data from Pohoda and builds the management reports | The mapping of accounts to the management structure has to be set up once |
The foundation is a direct connection to the Pohoda database. For the SQL and E1 editions, this is a technical task that takes tens of minutes. From then on, data refreshes automatically, typically every night, and nobody has to export anything. It is important that the connection is read-only. The accountant keeps working as before, and the reporting tool never writes anything into the books.
The chart of accounts answers the question of how transactions are booked. The management structure answers the question of how the company is run. Split revenue by product or channel, costs into direct and overhead, and keep personnel costs separate. You set up the mapping once. New accounts are either assigned to default categories automatically or wait in the unassigned list until the controller assigns them.
If your accountants fill them in consistently in Pohoda, you already have the foundation for controlling. You can also map a combination of account and cost center, so the same account can land on different P&L lines for different cost centers.
A P&L without a budget is just history. Once you upload the budget in the same structure, variances calculate themselves. The same goes for cash flow: Pohoda holds invoice due dates and payment history, so most of the forecast is pre-filled from real data. More on the Cash flow forecast.
The owner, the managing director or the bank each need to see a different slice of the data. Instead of emailing spreadsheets, share a specific dashboard with them. Everyone then works with the same version of the numbers.
Automated reporting has one weakness. It shows exactly what has been booked, including errors and fluctuations that nobody notices at a quick glance at a dashboard. And checking everything by hand before every management meeting is exactly the work you want to get rid of.
In Symfio, this work is done by Conrad, an AI controller. Conrad works with the same data as your reports, flags unusual movements in costs, drops in revenue or swings in profitability on its own, and explains what happened and why. To the question from the introduction, why the margin changed, it answers with specific numbers rather than another chart. It relies exclusively on verified data in Symfio, and when it is not sure, it says so.
Conrad does not replace the controller or the accountant. It does the first pass through the data, so people can focus on explaining the numbers instead of hunting for them. Read more in Symfio 2.0: Five Layers, Single Finance Team.
Groups often keep each company in a separate Pohoda database. For a group view, simply adding up the numbers is not enough. You need to eliminate intercompany transactions as well as intercompany receivables and payables, and align the charts of accounts. Technology group Piano Group connected nine companies running on Pohoda this way and went live in 14 days, including importing nine financial plans. See the Piano Group case study. The general approach is described on the Data and consolidation.
The technical connection of Pohoda SQL is usually done within an hour. The management part takes longer: agreeing on what the management P&L should look like and setting up the mapping. After six months of unsuccessful work with another vendor, the agency Effectix had working reporting within a single day. Refining it into a form that matches exactly how management runs the business then took about three months together with an external CFO (Effectix case study).
This is what mapping synthetic accounts to a management P&L can look like for a trading and services company. The account numbers follow the Czech chart of accounts. Sub-accounts differ from company to company, but the principle is the same.
| Management P&L line | Accounts in Pohoda |
| Revenue from goods | 604 |
| Revenue from services | 602 |
| Cost of goods sold | 504 |
| Direct cost of services (subcontracting, materials) | 501, sub-accounts of 518 for subcontracting |
| Gross margin | calculated line |
| Personnel costs | 521 to 528 |
| Marketing | sub-accounts of 518 for advertising |
| Operating overhead (rent, energy, IT, advisory) | 502, 503, rest of 518 |
| Other operating expenses and income | 511, 512, 513, 53x, 54x, 64x |
| EBITDA | calculated line |
| Depreciation and amortization | 551 |
| Provisions and allowances | 552 to 559 |
| Financial expenses and income | 56x, 66x |
| Income tax | 591, 592 |
| Net profit | calculated line |
The key step is splitting account 518 Other services. In most companies it is the largest cost account and mixes subcontracting for customers, marketing and rent. Without sub-accounts, both the margin and the overhead are distorted. If you do not have sub-accounts yet, introduce them from the start of the next month and map the history at least approximately.
The mapping must cover all P&L accounts, that is, all of classes 5 and 6. Otherwise the management net profit will not match the accounting figure, and management will stop trusting the report.
If the answer to most questions is yes, launching is a matter of days. If not, start with what is missing from the list. Reporting on inconsistent data just shows inconsistent numbers faster.
No. Reporting is built on top of your existing Pohoda. The accountant keeps working exactly as before.
SQL and E1 connect directly, usually within an hour. For other editions, we choose the best connection method together.
Automatically every night. Depending on your subscription, you can also trigger a sync manually with one click or schedule up to five refreshes a day.
Yes. A common setup is Pohoda in the smaller group companies and Helios or Business Central in the larger ones.
For a single company and basic overviews, it may be. Once you need consolidation of multiple companies, a budget with scenarios, a cash flow forecast, or dashboards shared with people who have no access to Pohoda, a tool built for financial reporting pays off.
No. The connection is read-only and the accountant keeps working in their own Pohoda. The only change they will notice is that nobody asks them for Excel exports anymore.
Map the history to the new management structure separately. Year-on-year comparisons then make sense despite changes in the chart of accounts.
It watches the numbers for you. It flags unusual movements in costs, revenue and profitability, explains what happened and answers questions such as why the margin dropped. It never writes into the books; corrections are still made by the accountant in Pohoda.
Yes. Dashboards and planning run natively in Symfio, and connecting your own Power BI is optional and comes at no extra cost.
Yes. Symfio data is available through a connector (MCP) for Claude and ChatGPT, so you can ask about results and variances in plain language.
To see how Pohoda connects to Symfio in practice, read Native integrations: connecting your ERP, accounting software and Excel to Symfio. For an overview of all reporting features, see Reporting and dashboards.