Viewing Your Profit and Loss Statement

Background

A Profit and Loss Statement (also known as a “P&L”) is an important tool that helps you measure the financial health of your business. This report shows details of your income and expenses over a period of time. As a business owner, you will use this to determine whether your business is profitable within a timeframe, such as a month or a year.

For further reading about how to manage P&L responsibilities in your business, see our related blog article Your Small Business Needs a Profit and Loss Statement!

How To Use the Profit & Loss Statement in Patriot Software

As a Patriot Software customer, you can find this under Reports > Accounting > Financial Reports > Profit & Loss Statement.

The P&L will display all of your income accounts, such as sales for each product and service you sell, and all of our expense accounts, such as payroll expenses and other operating costs.  By default, the prior month will be shown.

Shortcuts for date selection: Profit and Loss Report has some handy shortcuts to allow you select automatic timeframes when choosing dates:

• ALT + Q = Quarter
• ALT + M = Month
• ALT + C = Custom
• ALT + Y = Year
• ALT + Right Arrow = Next M/Y/D
• ALT + Left Arrow = Previous M/Y/D

Choose which Accounting Basis to view: Choose either either “Cash” or “Accrual” in the selector dropdown. Easily change back and forth and download in both if desired.

Filter by departments: You can also filter this report by Departments if you have set those up in the software.  Click “Run Report” to refresh the results.

To view comparison data on the Profit and Loss Report, click the “Compare Report” link at the top of the report. You can compare data from the previous period, the previous year, or a custom date. After you select your desired date range, click the “Compare” button.

Accounting Drill-Down Reporting: With our drill-down reporting, you don’t have to navigate away from the report to see transaction details. Click each entry on the report to open a panel on the right side of the page. The panel displays the details of each transaction that makes up the total. Click “Go to Full Report” to go to the General Ledger report with the same filters.

You can print a PDF version of the report or click “Download Spreadsheet” to download a comma-delimited file with this income and expense amounts to import into your bank or other software.  A comma-delimited file will open in your spreadsheet program, such as Excel.