On Ambrook you can review both your Profit & Loss (P&L) and Balance Sheet statements by going to the “Accounting” tab on your navigation bar. From there, you can easily flip between your P&L and Balance Sheet statements by clicking the buttons in the upper-right corner.
These statements are the foundation of your business performance and tax preparations, so we recommend looking at them often to catch any bookkeeping mistakes early.
Applying Date & Basis Filters
Both of your statements can be viewed over any date range you choose. You can edit the date range by clicking the date filter. You can also toggle the basis of the statements between cash and accrual. The key differences between an accrual basis versus a cash basis are:
Accrual basis P&Ls will include income and expense based on the dates you issue invoices or bills, and will omit matched invoice and bill payments.
Accrual basis P&Ls will include accrued asset and liability accounts, including Accounts Receivable, Undeposited Checks, Accounts Payable, and Outstanding Checks.
Every business files taxes on either a cash or accrual basis, but regardless you can still use both for reviewing your business. For more information on cash vs accrual basis you can review this article here.
Reviewing your P&L
The P&L is split out into sections based on the category groupings you used when setting up your chart of accounts. Within each section you will find rows for all of the category tags you have created and assigned to that group.
The statement is broken out into columns by month across the date range you selected. Each number across the row represents your total income or expense tagged to that category within the month. If you selected a partial month either at the start or end of your date filter, the total will only reflect the portion of the month you selected.
Clicking on any value will give you a detailed view of underlying transactions. From there you can see what types of transactions (invoices, journal entries, etc) on what dates are contributing to your category total. You can click into the details page of any transaction from this view, and you can also change the way a transaction is tagged. If you re-tag a transaction, it will automatically be removed from the detailed view you are in and applied to whatever you have re-tagged it with.
Reviewing your Balance Sheet
The Balance Sheet is split out into sections based account types: Assets, Liabilities, and Equities. Within each one of those groups there are subtypes, for example the Assets section contains Current Assets and Long Term Assets. If you click onto the name of any account you can see its details and change its type if you want to change how it is grouped.
The balance sheet is broken out into columns by month across the date range you selected. Each number across a row represents the balance of an account at the end of the month. For the last month in your date range, if you selected a partial month (such as December 15th), the number in the December column would be your balance at the end of your date range - not the month.
Clicking on any value will give you a detailed view of underlying transactions. From there you can see what types of transactions (invoices, journal entries, etc) on what dates are contributing to your account balance total. You will also see what category tag the transactions are applied to. You can click into the details page of any transaction from this view and change the way a transaction is tagged. This will update the way a transaction is reflected in your P&L but will not remove the transaction from the account.
Exporting your Reports
Both the P&L and the Balance Sheet can be exported straight from the Accounting page by clicking the download button, located at the top-right corner of the page. From the Exports tab in Settings, you can access spreadsheet downloads for Detailed P&L and Balance Sheet reports, transaction details, Statement of Cash Flows, and more.