Profit and Loss Modification

Quick reference

• 00:04 In this video I want to talk to you about how to customize your Profit and Loss
• 00:09 report and to show you a couple of things that I find to be kind of fun to look at.
• 00:13 On the left hand side of the screen, I'll have you click on Reports,
• 00:19 and then open up the Profit and Loss report.
• 00:22 Let's go ahead and change a couple of things.
• 00:25 So first, there is this drop-down in the upper left-hand corner under
• 00:29 the text Display Columns By, let's change it from total only to same Months.
• 00:34 Over to the right, Run Report.
• 00:37 This isn't very interesting for us because we have very little data in here.
• 00:41 But as your business grows, you're going to start to fill in and
• 00:45 have more and more data, and it'll be nice to see the trends.
• 00:49 So in our example, we can see what's happening.
• 00:51 We can see that there is, well, no income until June, speaking of a late start.
• 00:57 But June we had some income, July was pretty thin,
• 01:00 August we had a lot of income, it was just booming in August.
• 01:04 When we look at the cost of goods we can see we bought a lot of candy here,
• 01:08 very little candy here.
• 01:10 You kind of get the idea, I like to see this because I like to see the trends.
• 01:15 Some businesses we know when the busy season is, and when the slow season is,
• 01:20 but some businesses we don't.
• 01:22 One of the nice things about looking at it this way is you can see when can you go on
• 01:26 vacation?
• 01:27 When do you need to get extra staffing?
• 01:29 Kind of what can you expect from year to year.
• 01:33 Let's change this back to Totals and I'll show you something different.
• 01:37 So I'll click Run Report to get it to update.
• 01:40 Let's pretend that we had data here from last year.
• 01:44 We can say Compare Another Period, and then we'll say Previous Period,
• 01:49 Dollar Change and Percentage Change, Run Report.
• 01:53 We don't have transactions in our make believe QuickBooks file from last year.
• 01:57 But if you imagine this as your QuickBooks file,
• 02:00 I think you'll find this to be really helpful and interesting.
• 02:03 For the period January 1st to August 13th, 2020, these are my numbers.
• 02:09 Comparing that to the exact same dates from last year, these are my numbers.
• 02:15 I can then see the dollar change, so increase or decrease.
• 02:19 And I can see the percentage change, increase or
• 02:22 decrease Sometimes it's nice to see this because as your business is growing,
• 02:27 you might not see a big difference, but you might see a big percentage.
• 02:31 I want you to be able to compare apples to apples.
• 02:34 So not necessarily comparing the whole year because we're still
• 02:38 in the middle of the year, but rather, how did I do the first eight months
• 02:42 of this year compared to the first eight months of last year.
• 02:47 There's a handful of things you can compare here and
• 02:49 I'll let you do that on your own.
• 02:51 We go ahead and reset this.
• 02:55 Other things that I like for customizing is to come up here in the upper right hand
• 02:59 corner and click on the button that says Customize If I wanted to,
• 03:06 I can say divide my numbers by 1,000,
• 03:08 that would make sense if my business was bigger, but it's not.
• 03:12 I can say show me stuff without the sense, I don't need the pennies.
• 03:17 Show me stuff that's negative as red text.
• 03:20 I like that because that helps me spot mistakes, and
• 03:23 anything that I want to keep an eye on.
• 03:26 I can look at the rows and columns.
• 03:30 I can filter and I can say only show me specific things.
• 03:34 I can change the header footer.
• 03:37 So right now the default header is profit and Loss and
• 03:40 I'm going to say Profit Loss Minor Changes.
• 03:45 And then Run Report.
• 03:48 So see how I have taken off the pennies?
• 03:51 Right now there's no negative numbers, but let's go ahead and
• 03:55 change this to show by months.
• 03:56 Over to the right, Run Report.
• 03:59 Now, when I look at the months,
• 04:01 I see that this is a negative, and I see that this is a negative.
• 04:04 And then down here for my income, I can see negatives.
• 04:08 So maybe you don't want to see negatives, but
• 04:11 sometimes it have been helpful to change the negative to another color just so
• 04:15 that I can visualize it a little bit better.
• 04:17 I've given this report a different name.
• 04:20 I like that because if I wanted to print a report, I can.
• 04:25 If I wanted to email the report, I can.
• 04:27 Any of this stuff is going to give me the header that I provided for this.
• 04:31 I can also export to Excel and so forth.
• 04:35 One thing that you can do if you wanted is you can save your customizations by
• 04:40 clicking this green button in the upper right hand corner.
• 04:43 It has the name that you've given it.
• 04:45 You can choose to share it with everybody who has access to your QuickBooks.
• 04:50 Or no one you're not sharing with anyone,
• 04:53 you're just sharing it with yourself and click Save.
• 04:56 There's a lot of really great things you can do to customize your Profit and
• 05:00 Loss report.
• 05:01 I encourage you to fiddle around with it, change some dials,
• 05:05 change this one, change this one, and change the customize

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