The Profit & Loss (P&L) organizes and lists all of your revenues and expenses in a way that makes it easy to calculate and understand the profitability of your business. You can read more about how to read a P&L in this Ambrook Education article.
On Ambrook you can review your P&L 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. Below is a video that walks through in-app statements. If you prefer to click through on your own, you can access it here.
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. Read more about the differences between cash and accrual in our Ambrook Education here, and more about accrual accounting here. The main differences include:
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.
Reviewing your P&L
Step 1: Review income and expenses over time
Your 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. Review income and expenses over time to identify anything of note.
Step 2: View the underlying transactions
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.
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 a detailed P&L, which includes all the underlying transactions for each category.