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A financial figure is one fact: an amount of money that moved, or is expected to move, in one direction. But there is more than one correct way to write that fact down. A reference frame is the convention that decides which. Financials has two.

Flow Frame

Signed by which way the money actually flows. Money in is positive, money out is negative. A $10,000 loss payment is -10000; a $3,000 recovery is 3000.

Type Frame

Signed by whether the money went the way its Invoice Type expects. Positive in the expected direction. A $10,000 loss on a loss type is 10000; a $3,000 recovery on a recovery type is also 3000. A figure running against what the type expects is the negative one here.
Both describe the same money. They disagree only about which side of zero it sits on.

When to Use Each Frame

Flow frame answers “what happened to cash?” A summed column gives the net effect on the business. Losses and recoveries offset each other, which is usually what a finance team wants from a spreadsheet. Type frame answers “how big was this?” A claim’s costs read as positive numbers, which is how most loss runs, bordereaux, and reports to carriers are conventionally presented. A summed column gives total incurred, not a net. Neither is more correct. The right choice depends on who is reading the file.

On Screen the Frame Is Carried by Color

Every screen in Financials reads the flow frame, and expresses it with color instead of a sign:
  • Green — money coming in, where the flow frame would write a positive number.
  • Black — money going out, where the flow frame would write a negative one.
  • $0, uncolored — a real zero. There is no flow to ink.
Expanded Event Financials overview for the Estate of Maria Alvarez event, with outgoing ALAE, Indemnity, Coverage Expense, and claim cost amounts in black and the incoming Deductible amounts and net owed total in green

In this event overview, black amounts are money going out through ALAE, Indemnity, Coverage Expense, and claim costs; green amounts are the incoming Deductible and the net owed total after that recovery.

In the live event above, the black ALAE, Indemnity, Coverage Expense, and claim-cost figures are unsigned magnitudes of money leaving the business. The green Deductible is money coming in, and the green $49,750 owed total is the net result after that incoming recovery offsets the outstanding outgoing amounts. The screen never needs a minus sign: color carries the flow frame while the number stays positive. So every figure on screen is an unsigned magnitude, and the frame setting changes nothing about how it looks. Choosing a frame only matters where a figure leaves the app and a sign has to do the work the color was doing.
A zero is not the same as a missing value. A settled line, a cleared reserve, or a type with no activity yet shows $0. A genuinely absent value — no date, no payee — shows an em dash.

Where a Frame Applies

Three exports write figures out of the app. Each one carries a frame. Everything defaults to the flow frame. A company that changes nothing gets flow-framed signs on every one of these exports. Configured export columns and smart tags take no frame. Each one prints what its expression computes, so the same column prints the same figure at every company. The figures it reads are in the flow frame, and its expression can put them in the type frame instead, so that, for example, paid losses print positive.

Choosing a Frame

Under Admin → Financials Configuration → Reporting, each of the three exports has its own Flow / Type toggle. See Reporting for that configuration surface. The setting is company-wide per export: one choice that every Invoice Type follows, including types created later. The Reporting page names the exact export surface beside each toggle, so a change can be scoped to invoice exports, Overview exports, or reserve updates without changing how figures appear on screen. Below the toggles, an Invoice type overrides switch turns on a list of deviations — one row naming an Invoice Type, an export, and the frame it takes instead.
  • Two exports cannot be overridden. Invoices and Overview have amount columns that add up across Invoice Types, so a document mixing frames within one of them would produce a column that sums to nothing meaningful. Both appear in the override picker disabled, with that reason on hover, rather than hidden.
  • Flipping a company-wide export to Type warns. In the type frame every figure is positive in its own type’s expected direction, so the sign stops distinguishing money in from money out — which on a column that nets is the sign’s whole job.
  • Only Reserve Update can be overridden, and only for a Loss/Recovery type. An Operating type holds no reserves, so it takes no override.
  • Only signs change. Which figures exist, which rows they sit on, and which cells are blank are all unaffected. Zeros stay real zeros.
  • Two exports set differently will disagree, on purpose. A type-framed Overview export prints 6000 where a flow-framed reserve listing prints -6000. They agree to the cent whenever both are on the same frame — which is the default.

Worked Example

An event with two Invoice Types. Indemnity expects money out: $10,000 expected, $4,000 paid. Subrogation expects money in: $3,000 expected, $1,000 collected. Subrogation is unaffected. Its money flows in, which is also what its type expects, so both frames agree. The frames only diverge on types whose expected direction is money out. In every frame, Reserves + Paid = Total holds with signs intact — for Indemnity, (-6000) + (-4000) = -10000 in the flow frame and 6000 + 4000 = 10000 in the type frame. The three figures are always on the same side, so a row never sums to zero by accident.