Profit & Loss

The Profit & Loss Statement shows how your business performed over a chosen period: what you earned, what it cost you to earn it, and what profit or loss remained. It runs from Operating Income at the top through to Net Profit or Net Loss at the bottom, with recognised subtotals along the way.

Every figure is calculated fresh each time you generate the report, directly from posted accounting entries in the General Ledger. The statement holds no balances of its own. This means the numbers always reconcile to your actual postings, and it also means nothing on this screen can be typed over, adjusted, or overridden.

Consistency with your other statements

The Net Profit or Net Loss calculated here is the same figure that carries into Retained Earnings on the Balance Sheet, and the same starting point the Cash Flow Statement uses for Operating Activities. All three statements read the same posted entries through the same Chart of Accounts structure, so they stay in step with each other.

What you can use it for

• Reviewing financial performance for a month, quarter, year, or custom range
• Comparing performance across business entities within a group company
• Investigating any figure back to the individual journal entries behind it
• Producing period-end reporting packs in PDF, Excel, or Google Sheets

Generating a report

Opening the screen

Go to Financial Management › Profit & Loss in the sidebar.

The screen opens with the filter bar at the top and a placeholder statement below. Nothing is calculated until you click Generate.

Choosing your filters

Group Company and Business Entity

Select a Group Company, a Business Entity, or both.

Choosing a Group Company on its own consolidates all business entities beneath it. Once you select a Group Company, the Business Entity dropdown lists only the entities mapped to it, and defaults to “All”. Selecting a specific entity restricts the statement to that entity’s postings alone.

You must select at least a Group Company or a Business Entity. If neither is chosen, the report will not generate and a validation message appears.

Period

Choose from All Periods, This Year, Last Year, This Quarter, This Month, Last Month, or Custom.

Your financial year runs April to March, so “This Year” and “Last Year” resolve against that cycle rather than the calendar year.

Selecting Custom reveals From Date and To Date fields. You need to supply at least one of the two — if both are left empty, the report will not generate. Entries dated on the To Date itself are included.

Basis

Choose Accrual or Cash.

On an Accrual basis, every qualifying income and expense posting dated within your period is recognised, whether or not money has changed hands. This is the conventional basis for financial reporting.

On a Cash basis, an income or expense posting is only recognised if the journal it belongs to also includes a line posted to a bank or cash account. Any journal without a cash or bank leg is left out. An advisory badge appears in the header to remind you which basis is in force.

Generating and resetting

Click Generate to build the statement. The system validates your selections, then calculates and renders the full statement along with the summary tiles and side panels.

Click Reset to clear all filter selections back to their defaults and return the report area to its placeholder state. Reset only affects your filter choices — it never touches underlying transaction data.

If no qualifying postings exist for the scope and period you chose, the statement shows a “No Data Found” message rather than a page of zeroes.

What appears in the statement

Which postings are included

A journal contributes to this statement only when all of the following are true:

• Its status is Posted. Draft, unposted, cancelled, and deleted entries never appear.
• It is not an intercompany journal. These are excluded by design.
• It falls within the Group Company or Business Entity scope you selected.
• Its posting date falls within your selected period.
• At least one of its lines is posted to a General Ledger account categorised as Income or Expense.
• Under Cash basis only, it also contains at least one bank or cash line.

Why some lines of a journal don’t appear

Accounting entries always balance across two or more accounts. Only the income and expense side of an entry appears here. The offsetting lines posted to asset, liability, or equity accounts belong to the Balance Sheet and are deliberately excluded from this statement.

Where the postings come from

Three sources feed this statement, all of them through the General Ledger:

• Manual Journals — entries you post directly
• Sales — cost of goods sold recognised when deliveries are made and inventory is issued
• Asset Management — depreciation runs and gains or losses on asset disposal

The statement reflects the posted values from these sources but performs none of their calculations itself. Depreciation, for example, is worked out entirely within Asset Management; this statement only reports the resulting entries.

How accounts are classified

Each account’s position in the statement comes from its existing Category and Sub-category in the Chart of Accounts. There is no separate Profit & Loss mapping to maintain, so a change to an account’s sub-category in the Chart of Accounts changes where it appears here.

If an income or expense account doesn’t match one of the named sub-categories, it falls into the nearest “Other” grouping within its category. Nothing posted to an income or expense account is ever left out of the statement.

Reading the statement

Operating Income

Built from four elements:

• Sales Revenue — credit postings on Sales accounts
• Less: Sales Returns — debit postings on those same Sales accounts, shown as a deduction
• Less: Discount Allowed — shown as a deduction
• Other Operating Income — added

Operating Income = Sales Revenue − Sales Returns − Discount Allowed + Other Operating Income

Splitting revenue from returns by posting direction means you can see gross sales and returns separately, rather than only a net figure. Where a Sales account has credits but no debits, no Sales Returns line appears for it, and vice versa.

Cost of Goods Sold

Combines two sub-categories:

• Cost of Goods Sold accounts
• Manufacturing & Production accounts

Gross Profit or Gross Loss

Gross Profit = Operating Income − Cost of Goods Sold

This subtotal is highlighted directly beneath the Cost of Goods Sold section, and its label changes to “Gross Loss” if the result is negative. Where no cost of goods sold has been posted for the period, Gross Profit equals Operating Income.

Operating Expense

Combines:

• Office & Administration
• Selling & Distribution
• Depreciation & Amortization
• Other Operating Expense — any remaining expense accounts not classified elsewhere

Operating Profit or Operating Loss

Operating Profit = Gross Profit − Operating Expense

Highlighted beneath the Operating Expense section, with the label switching on the sign of the result.

Non-Operating Income

Income earned outside your core trading activity, grouped by sub-category: Rent Income, Interest Gain, Dividend Earned, Discount Received, Profit on Sale of Asset, and Miscellaneous Income. A sub-category only appears if it has contributing accounts for the period.

Gains on asset disposal are calculated and posted by Asset Management and surface here automatically.

Non-Operating Expense

Costs outside your core trading activity, grouped as Interest Paid, Miscellaneous Expense, and Other Non-Operating Expense. Again, only sub-categories with contributing accounts appear.

Profit Before Tax

Profit Before Tax = Operating Profit + Non-Operating Income − Non-Operating Expense

Shown as a distinct subtotal immediately above the Tax line.

Tax

Tax is charged at 17% of Profit Before Tax where that figure is positive. An inline note confirms the rate has been applied.

Where Profit Before Tax is zero or negative, no tax is charged and the line is annotated “Not applicable – PBT ≤ 0”.

Tax here is a calculated figure derived from the statement itself, not a balance drawn from a General Ledger account.

Net Profit or Net Loss

Net Profit = Profit Before Tax − Tax

This is the final and most prominent line of the statement. Its label changes between Net Profit and Net Loss according to the result.

Summary tiles and side panels

The KPI tiles

Three tiles sit above the statement:

• Total Income — all income accounts, operating and non-operating combined
• Total Expenses — all expense accounts, plus the calculated Tax
• Net Profit / Loss — the final result, with its colour and border reflecting whether you are in profit or loss

Because Total Expenses includes Tax, the three tiles reconcile directly to the statement body and the Summary panel.

The Summary panel

A condensed waterfall running from Sales Revenue down to Net Profit or Loss, showing each addition and deduction in sequence. Lines with a zero value are left out to keep it readable.

The Breakdown panel

Horizontal proportional bars for Sales Revenue, Cost of Goods Sold, Operating Expense, Non-Operating Income, Non-Operating Expense, and Tax, scaled against the largest figure. Only positive values are plotted, so this is a quick way to see the relative weight of each element at a glance.

Exploring the detail

Expanding and collapsing sections

Every section and sub-heading has a chevron you can click to expand or collapse it. Expanding reveals the underlying sub-headings and individual account lines with their amounts; collapsing hides them while keeping the section total visible.

Collapsing a parent section also collapses any expanded sub-sections within it.

This is purely a display control. Nothing you expand or collapse affects a calculated figure.

Drilling into an account

Any underlined account line in the statement can be clicked to open a journal entry popup. It shows:

• The account number and name
• Its Category and Sub-category
• How many posted journal entries contributed to the figure
• The Net Balance, shown in brackets if negative
• Each contributing journal line: journal number, posting date, description, business entity, and the debit or credit amount

The popup respects your current scope, period, and basis, so it explains the figure as displayed rather than the account’s whole history. If an account has no entries within your current selection, the popup still shows its identifying details along with a “No journal entries for this account” message.

Exporting

Once a report has been generated, click Export and choose PDF, MS Excel, or Google Sheets.

Export acts on the statement as currently rendered, so generate the view you want first. Export options are only available after a successful generation — there is nothing to export from the placeholder state.