 QuickBooks Online 2024 Comparative Profit and Loss P&L or Income Statement. Get ready and clear your mind because we don't overanalyze. We Intuit with Intuits. QuickBooks Online 2024. Here we are online in our browser searching for QuickBooks Online Test Drive looking for the result that has Intuit.com and the URL Intuit being the owner of QuickBooks selecting the United States version of the software and verifying that we're not a robot. Opening up our major financial statement reports like we do every time. Reports on the left hand side. We're in the favorites. Right clicking on that balance sheet. Open link in new tab. Right click on the profit and loss otherwise known as the income statement. Our point of focus in this presentation. Open the link in a new tab. Let's close this first tab. We don't need that. Back to the middle tab. Closing up the hamburger. We're going to change that range. Bringing it back to 2. First a word from our sponsor. 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So get one because the scientific survey participants could really use some extra cash. If you would like a commercial free experience consider subscribing to our website at accountinginstruction.com or accountinginstruction.thinkific.com 1023 010123 tab 123123 tab run it to refresh it. Let's tab to the right and close up the hamburger and then change that range. Once again back in time we're going back in time people 010123 tab 123123 tab run it to refresh it. There's our profit and loss otherwise known as the income statements sometimes abbreviated as the P and L report. We looked at last time the general comparison of the balance sheet income statement and the profit and loss general report as it is here. Like with the balance sheet now we could run multiple different formats of the profit and loss report. Remember that in future presentations as well we went through a lot of the formatting tools up top. We won't go through all of the different customization and formatting tools again because most of them will be very similar from report to report. However we do want to point out that there's that difference between whether a report is a point in time report as the balance sheet is meaning it has one date being reported here compared to a report that has a range of time such as the profit and loss report that is reporting activity or performance over that time range. So now when we do these comparative reports for example you're going to notice some differences in that time range report versus the point in time report. Okay so if we did some comparative reports we can do a similar process as we did with the balance sheet we might say I want to compare or just see multiple periods we might not call this a comparative report because that would indicate that we're subtracting out columns having two periods that we're comparing. Instead we're going to run the report by month or by a quarter so that's the drop down here if I run it by month then I can say run and there we have it so now it's broken out by month and if I go to the right of it it gets us this total column which isn't done on the balance sheet that's one of the differences if I go to the balance sheet and I was to say show me this by months then it's just going to give you 12 months no total why no total because the months are as of a point in time as of the end of the month it doesn't make sense to total up all the months on the balance sheet does make sense on the income statement because the income statement is basically like showing us how far we drove and this is my analogy you drive in your car and see how far you can go in a day or something like that and then when you drive at the next day to compare to the last day you either reset the odometer or kind of count from that point going forward right that's what's happening with the profit and loss so therefore we can give how far we went in this analogy on to each of the months and we can total them up and see how far we went in the entire year would be the general the general idea so we can also do that then by day we can do it by week we can do it by month we can do it by quarter quarters is quite common so now we have the income didn't have any data for the first two quarters and but we and we don't have much data in the third quarter but we can compare the the quarter so we can look at them at least side by side also note when we do these types of reports QuickBooks defaults to have the oldest period first reading like a book from left to right oldest to newest and that's fine although sometimes you will see reports as we'll see shortly in the comparative reports where they put the current month first that makes sense to some degree because the current month is the most important month generally because it's the one closest to us if I could do it by year if I did it by year then it doesn't change anything here what puts a total on it but we would have to change the year to go back to two thousand twenty two right if I went to the last two years there's nothing in twenty two but now you have the range expanding between the two years and then I can do it year by year let's bring it back up to two thousand twenty three and then we have the customers now this isn't this is kind of strange they have it in the display columns area which you kind of think of as like time frames but this is by customer so if I run it by customer then I get the the customers up top this will be useful if you're using something like a job cost type of system you might run a report like this so you can see the information that's that's happening on a on a customer by customer type of basis we might touch on that a little bit here but a job cost system is a thing in and of itself so we might have a specialty section or course on job cost systems in particular you can do a similar thing by vendor which means that it has the vendors up top and it's breaking out the the income and expenses by vendor when you think about vendors most likely you're thinking about the expense side of things now be broke being broken out this could be a quite long report if you had a lot of vendors which often times people do and then you could do the same by employees products and services so if we run it by products and services now you've got them up top and you can see what you're selling in terms of income and and the cost of goods sold that's associated with the income on a product by product basis which could be uses useful and then you have your tags tags as a special kind of tool that is another sorting category and you can see you can sort it here you might also it as we're thinking about these if you have if you have class tracking on you can also often basically sort your income statement by class tracking those are specialty tools class tracking and tags location tracking similar tools we have another section or course specializing in those areas as well so that's going to be one way that you can do comparative reports let's go back to the total another way that you can do the comparative types of reports is that you can say I want to have the current period and then compare it to the prior period so if we want to compare December to the prior month of November I can change the range up top to eleven let's go to twelve twelve one two three so now I have the month of December up top just the month of December and then I want to compare it to the prior month selecting the drop down I can say give me the prior month and it defaults here to November that looks correct so I'm just going to say let's run that so now we have a comparative report but now they put the current month first and that's fine because that's our most important month and then the prior month second also note with these comparative reports we can only compare two periods because likely with the comparative reports the next step you want to do is not add up the two periods having a total which is nice too on the income statement where it's not as big deal on the balance sheet but what you want to do instead is subtract them to see the difference in what your performance was in the current month versus the prior month in this case so if I select the drop down we say give me the dollar change poor five or if you please I'm going to pull out the trustee calculator and so we can do some calculations so then of course we have for example the totals down here two four five point six four month well wait that's not right the current month is up top one two nine six point five eight minus the two four five five point six four that gives us the negative one one five nine oh six that's great we can compare that to our prior months and stuff and how we're how we've been doing in the past but if we want to compare it to another company like if we were a McDonald's and we want to have we were like a hamburger shop and we want to compare to McDonald's or something they make way too much money for me to think to compare my dollars to dollars but we could compare possibly percentages when we benchmark and so if we run the percentages in our performance type report percent change run that one run that one so now if I do that same thing I've got the one two six nine point five eight minus the two four five five point six four that gives us a negative one five five one one five nine oh six and then I divide that by the prior month that's how you do the percent increase or decrease by the prior month two four five five point six four and that gives us if I move the decimal two places over a forty eight point two percent increase so if we are decreased I'm sorry because it was a negative here but if so if hamburger sales went down but for us by forty eight percent that's her or whatever the sale and I compared that to like a McDonald's did their sales follow a similar trend would be the question if they did then maybe the assumption would be of course that if they market thing and not an us thing it's not that people just got mad at us and they they canceled us on the YouTubes or something and then now no one likes us and they keep on stealing our hamburgers and throwing them at people for some reason because I don't know what happened but in any case now we can say we could do it and on these ones like two forty seven point eight one minus two forty two twenty seven point oh one we get the one twenty I can take that and divide it by the prior month one two seven point oh one and then that's going to be ninety five point one one percent increase in this case right and we can see that on a line by line basis that's nice I can I can customize this report like I typically would customizing up top because it might be used for external usages and we do our normal negative numbers bracketed I often will remove the pennies show it in red and then in the headers and footers we might remove the date time report basis then of course we might change the name now on the profit and loss the basic name change you might do if it was just a normal profit and losses call it an income statement just that might stand you apart a little bit because maybe some people maybe some people see that as more like a professional or whatever they like to call it an income statement rather than a profit and loss it just depends on what you've what you've gotten used to I guess so you can then call it an income statement and there but when we do a comparative we might want to call it a comparative income statement so now it's a comparative income statement and then of course once we do this if we're going to save this to our external reporting like we did with the balance sheets we might want to save this stuff so we can go up and memorize the report I want to save the customization I'll make a new group and I'll just call it like month and reports group reports and then add it boom bam save it so there we have that if I go into the first tab and then go to my customized reports and refresh the screen so that now we have the save so I can simply open that up and go directly to it going forward so you can also do other comparative reports as well so now we're coming this is where we have to think how many reports do I want to be given because we saw that there's a bunch of different reports we can do once we dive into the realm of comparative reports horizontal analysis reports month by month reports and so on on the balance sheet and now we have a similar thing on the income statement right because I could compare for example the these two periods I could say I want to compare the quarter right I could say from I'll stop saying right ten oh one two three I got I think I think I got a thing developing I'm saying right too many times I can tell I'm annoying myself so any case there's the prior quarter and the current quarter and so so you can do a quarter by quarter comparison you might do a you know a half a year by year comparison so we might we might take this for the whole year oh one oh one two three to twelve thirty one two three and there's January through December and the prior period there was nothing in it the prior period but you get the idea then let's bring it back let's bring it back to normal so I'll bring it back to normal here before we do the next thing the next thing we can do is if I hit the top down up top we might want to compare the current to the previous year so I might go down here and say okay I want to compare to the previous year and I'll do the same thing with the dollar change and the percentage change so now instead of comparing to the previous month it's going to go to the previous year so let's for example take this to back to one month of twelve oh one two three so now it's comparing December of two thousand twenty three to the prior year there's nothing in it but the prior years December and if I wanted to compare November or whatever I could do that or if I want to compare like the quarter ten oh one two three to twelve thirty one two three now it's comparing the quarter the last quarter of two thousand twenty three compared to two thousand and twenty two the last quarter we can do the last half of the year the last two quarters so on and so forth with this formatting the next one we have here is going to be the year to date so we can compare the current period like a month that we're looking at compared to the year to date numbers notice that we have a few more options here than we saw on the balance sheet because the balance sheet is a point in time report and so that there's where some of the differences lie so I'm going to say percent of year to date as well I'll go ahead and run it so now we've got this first one being December and then the year to date is January to December remember that this data set only had stuff in it for the last few months the last quarter or so so that's why there's not a huge difference in the numbers but you can see that comparison as well then we also have the previous year to date so if I hit the drop down here we can compare to the previous year to date so I'm going to say okay run that and so there's our numbers for December and now we have the previous year to date January through December of 2022 nothing's in it for this time because there's no data in that time range with our data set okay so we'll get back into in future presentations we'll talk a little bit more about these items in future presentations but those are the general comparative reports so the general idea with the comparative reports let's bring it back to normal first run it usually two types of comparisons one where you're going to be comparing things and then have the total of the things that have been compared usually in timeframes months quarters years but you could also do customers vendors and and classes and what not and doing this will allow you to have a total column that sums them up and allow you to have more than two periods to show on one report and then the other comparative report format would be this way where you're going to choose the current period that you're in like month quarter or year and then select the previous period so it'll pick the previous period or you can pick the previous year same time in the previous year same month same quarter so on in the previous year or you can do that year to date items down here the most common ones would probably be these two up top let's go back to the most common might be the previous period so we have November and December comparison and the general layout looks like this you might call this a comparative income statement sometimes it might be called like a horizontal analysis that you might hear that term because we're comparing and doing our calculations horizontally as opposed to a vertical analysis which will talk more about in a future presentation.