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About this lesson
Learn how to drill down into the detail behind the profit and loss, and various ways to modify the report.
Exercise files
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4.02 profit-and-loss-modification - Exercise.docx61.5 KB 4.02 profit-and-loss-modification - Exercise solution.docx
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Quick reference
Profit and loss modification
The profit and loss (aka income statement) can tell us about the health of our business. We can modify this in various ways to answer questions we might have or to see trends.
When to use
When you look at the profit and loss, you're seeing a (one) snapshot in time. If you want to see how this period compares to another, you can modify the report to see it side by side with other periods. Maybe you'd like to see the report as whole numbers, you can remove the cents. There are a lot of ways to customize your reports and each person is different in their preferences of what they wish to see.
Instructions
View multiple periods side by side:
- Open the profit and loss report
- Scroll up so that the light gray box appears.
- Change the date range to all dates by changing the report period.
- Just under report period, change the dropdown from 'total only' to say 'months'.
- Click run report
Remove the cents:
- In the upper right corner, click on the gray button called customize
- Check the box next to 'without cents'
- Click run report
Rename the report:
- In the upper right corner, click on the gray button called customize
- Scroll down to the section called header/footer and expand this section
- Change the text in the field to the right of report title
- Click run report
Hints & tips
- You can customize the report by adjusting the settings that are displayed on the main report page in the light gray box
- You can customize the report in additional ways by clicking the gray button in the upper right hand corner that says customize
- Feel free to customize the report in as many ways as you'd like. This report is for you and if you really want [insert customization here], you should do that!
- Don't forget to save customizations if you find a format for your report that you really like and want to see again
- 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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