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Profit and loss report

The Profit & Loss report shows how much your business earned and spent over a period, and whether that left you with a profit or a loss. It brings together your revenue, the direct…

Profit and loss report

The Profit & Loss report shows how much your business earned and spent over a period, and whether that left you with a profit or a loss. It brings together your revenue, the direct cost of what you sold, and your other expenses.

Before you begin

  • Sign in and select your organisation. The report is available on every plan.
  • Figures are shown in your functional currency.
  • The report is built on an accrual basis: it counts income and costs when they are recorded in your general ledger (for example when you issue an invoice or post a purchase invoice), not when the money actually moves. For cash actually received, use Payments by Customer instead.

Open the report

  1. Go to Reports and, under Financial, open Profit & Loss.
  2. Choose a period using the Reporting Period selector — a preset such as This quarter, or a custom From/To range. The report opens on the current quarter by default.

[Screenshot required: Profit & Loss report showing the Revenue, Gross Profit and Net Profit summary cards]

How to read it

At the top, three summary cards give you the headline numbers:

  • Revenue — your total income for the period.
  • Gross Profit — revenue less the cost of sales.
  • Net Profit (or Net Loss if you spent more than you earned) — gross profit less your other expenses.

Below the cards, the Statement lays the same figures out line by line, grouped into sections with a Code, Account and Amount column:

  • Revenue — each income account and a Total revenue.
  • Cost of Sales — the direct cost of goods or services you sold (for example the cost of stock items), with a Total cost of sales. This section only appears when accounts flagged as cost of sales had activity in the period.
  • Gross profit — revenue less cost of sales.
  • Expenses — your other running costs, with a Total expenses.
  • Net profit / Net loss — the bottom line for the period.

Once your financial year end is recorded, the statement also has a Comparative column: the same accounts over an earlier period, with its dates written under the heading. For a whole financial year that is the year before; for any other range it is the same number of days just before it. See Comparatives.

If the period spans more than one month, a Monthly Revenue vs Expenses chart is shown above the statement so you can see the trend. The chart covers your range only, never the comparative's.

Note: Income accounts are credit-normal and expense accounts are debit-normal. In plain terms, Sales Scribe already works out the right sign for each account, so revenue and costs appear as you would expect without you having to think about debits and credits.

Where the figures come from

The report reads the posted journal lines behind your income and expense accounts:

  • Issuing a sales invoice or sales credit note moves your revenue figures.
  • Posting a purchase invoice or supplier credit note moves your cost and expense figures.
  • Selling a tracked stock item records its cost price as cost of sales.
  • Voiding any of these posts a reversal.

Anything that has not been posted to the ledger — quotes, estimates, proforma invoices, purchase orders and any draft — is not counted.

If the range covers a financial year that has been finalised, a notice above the report says so — who signed it off, when, and which revision. If entries dated inside that year have been posted since, the notice becomes a warning: the figures below are the ledger's, not the ones that were signed off, and it shows the profit that was signed next to what the ledger says now.

Important notes

  • Reversals are dated when they are posted, not backdated. If you void a document in a later period, the reversal appears in that later period rather than being removed from the original one. This keeps each period's report matching what the ledger actually recorded at the time.
  • If a period has no posted income or expense activity, the report shows "No posted journal lines on income or expense accounts in this period." Postings that net to nothing are still activity: a sale and its reversal show the account at 0.00, not the message.
  • If no account was flagged as cost of sales, all debit-normal activity is shown under Expenses and the gross-profit line simply equals revenue.

Export

Select Export CSV to download the statement. The file records the report title, your organisation, the accrual basis, the period and the currency in a header block before the figures.

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