Running it
- Open Reports › Profit & Loss. Set From and To, or use By fiscal quarter, which follows your financial year rather than the calendar.
- Choose the Basis: Accrual (the statutory view) or Cash.
- Under Compare with, choose No comparative, The period before, The same period last year, or one of your budgets (Budget: …; see Budgets).
- Press any account's row to open its statement for the same From and To — what that figure is made of.
- To see one project or branch, choose it under Project or Branch (your tracking tags; see Tracking). The page then says Only Project: ….
- To keep or send it, press Download and choose PDF (on your letterhead) or Excel (amounts as numbers). The file is the statement on screen: the same period, basis, comparative or budget, and tag.
The file always carries each line's share of revenue, whether or not % of revenue is switched on. With a comparative or a budget, the PDF is printed landscape so the extra columns fit.
Against a budget
Choosing a budget under Compare with puts it where the comparative period would be. The columns become Budget, Variance (this period less the budget) and Variance % (the variance as a share of the budget).
| Mark | Meaning |
|---|---|
| F | Favourable: more income, or less cost, than planned |
| U | Unfavourable: less income, or more cost, than planned |
The budget is counted for exactly the dates chosen. A month the dates cover in part counts its budget by days — from 1 to 5 October counts 5/31 of October's budget — and the page lists the months counted in part. Dates outside the budget's financial year have no budget, and the page says so.
With a Project or Branch chosen, only the budget's rows for that project or branch count, as only the lines carrying it count on the actual side.
Reading it down the page
| Line | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Revenue | What you invoiced and earned |
| Cost of sales | What the things you sold cost — whatever is coded to cost-of-sales accounts |
| Gross profit | Revenue less cost of sales |
| Operating expenses | What it takes to run the company, including depreciation |
| Other income | Income outside trading, such as gains on selling assets |
| Net profit | What is left; it flows into equity on the balance sheet |
Each line also shows its share of revenue. The amount says how much; the percentage says whether that is a lot.