 zero accounting software comparative profit and loss P&L income statement get ready to be an office hero with zero support accounting instruction by clicking the link below giving you a free month membership to all of the content on our website broken out by category further broken out by course each course then organized in a logical reasonable fashion making it much more easy to find what you need than can be done on a YouTube page we also include added resources such as Excel practice problems PDF files and more like QuickBooks backup files when applicable so once again click the link below for a free month membership to our website and all the content on it here we are in our custom zero homepage we set up in a prior presentation holding down control scrolling up a bit to get to that one seven five percent zoom in opening up the demo file doing so with the reset button resetting the data and opening the demo at the same time we're gonna be duplicating a few tabs to be putting reports in the major financial statement reports that is that being the balance sheet and the income statement so I'm gonna right click on the tab up top duplicate it right click on the tab up top and duplicate it again we do this every time so I'm going fairly fast middle tab we're gonna go to the accounting drop down and look at that balance sheet standard report tab to the right accounting drop down we want the income statement this time back to the tab to the right drop down we want the custom date range for the end of 2022 end of that date range there we have it let's update that report back to the tab to the right and we're now going to be focusing in on creating a custom income statement a comparative type of income statement so I'm gonna keep the standard one open here right click on this tab again duplicate it again so now we've got the balance sheet standard income statement and another income statement that we can play with and adjust so we did this on the balance sheet we're not going to go through all of the different kind of things that in tools you can use to format the reports because they're going to be similar for many different reports but we do want to do some of the major kind of formats of an income statement because the income statement is the other major reports you got the similar tools up top with the filtering tools and so on now we're going to try to compare two periods on the income statement so you have a couple options to do so we've got the compare items up top we can compare one period this way and so if I do that now we've got 2022 2021 and I can hit the drop down again and say that we want you know two years I can do multiple years of course and so now we've got two years if I want to do a month by month type of comparison possibly I hit the drop down over here and I want to customize it on the range just for December let's look at just the December data December 1st to December 31st let's say and then update that so now we've got December November October you could have multiple time frames possibly 12 months even for example in terms of a month by month comparison update that report so we have a whole lot of different options as we saw similar to the balance sheet and there's you can imagine a whole lot of different options that you could do now that you have these comparative components when you're providing reports to a client you could do a month by month comparison a quarter by quarter comparison this month compared to the prior month this quarter compared to the prior month and so on and so forth so what we want to do now is is try to make a two period comparison and then a change between those two periods and I'll do it a month by month comparison because we saw that in the balance sheet side so I'm gonna say let's go back and this is gonna be for December that looks good let's say we want two months let's say let's say one month one month okay so that'll give me my comparison up so now we've got December and November the most current month is first now I would like to see a change or difference between the two months also note that in some cases because this is an income statement as opposed to a balance sheet it would also make sense possibly to add up the two months right because you might you might want to say hey here's my year to date numbers month by month broken out and then add up to the total up to that time frame you wouldn't normally have that kind of situation on the balance sheet when you doing comparative reports because the balance sheet is as of a point in time so that's where you have this distinction between what kind of report are you working with and how these kind of formats might differ let's just look at that first just so we could see it if I go in the page layout I might say hey look maybe I want to do it this way I'm gonna pull the December over here so now I've got November first and then December and then maybe you want another column here that's going to be totaling everything up so I can add a formula column and I can say in that formula column I want to say take the November numbers plus the December numbers and that'll be my total total so it'll be total and then update the layout so so now you've got a nice breakout here of month by month the earliest month first and the later month and then you've got your total on the right-hand side now I'm gonna save this as a custom report so that I can try to make another one so I'm gonna then say I'm gonna put this as a custom I'm gonna say this is comparative income statement or something like that I'll save that here and now I want to make another one and I'll start from the scratch I'm gonna go back to the income statement right click on the income statement duplicate it I'm gonna pull that tab to the right and so now let's see if we can make changes to this one and so what we'll do here is I'm gonna change the date again let's go down to the custom date range and go from January to December not not January let's go from custom date range let's go from December 1st just one month to December 31st and update that okay and then we're gonna do one month to see November and December so now we've got our comparison December November now I'm gonna take the difference I'm gonna add the difference to the right and a percentage change so I'm gonna edit the layout and edit the layout and so now I'm gonna add another column for the difference between the two adding a column let's do a formula column and clicking on the column so I'm just gonna take then December minus November and then we want to say that's gonna be the change the change or difference let's say just difference difference if I could spell it and then I'll copy that I'm going to say let's add another column and we're gonna say we're gonna say add a column that's going to be a formula again and the formula is gonna be the difference divided by the prior period November and so that's our horizontal analysis I want that to show in the format of a percent so I'm gonna call this the percent difference we'll say on the column name and then let's update it see if it does what we expect I'm gonna pull out the trusty calculator while it's thinking there so let's pull out the trusty calculator okay so now we've got these two so we've got two eight point seven four minus the eight one one four point one five that gives us the difference so we could say in a performance perspective as opposed to the balance sheet which is where we stand at any particular time from a performance perspective we made more money in November than December so we've got that negative difference I can divide that then by the prior period which is going to be November eight one one four point one five and that's a seventy five point two four percent decrease then this is a common measurement tool that we really want to be able to have it's a common to present this way because if I'm trying to benchmark or compare say to other companies generally larger companies because I'm trying to mimic their success then I can't really just do so by looking at the dollar amounts and the dollar changes because they make more money than we do what we can say hey look what did the industry do in total in terms of their percentage increases and decreases in sale are we online with them in terms of the industry standards or the companies that we are benchmarking do we have any kind of competitive advantage why are we off or different than then the benchmark in terms of percentage increases and decreases so very important you know concept to be able to to be able to to run comparisons and then of course we can do our change up top and say this is a comparative income statement and we can change we can say that maybe I want to get rid of the decimals on that which we've been doing customarily and that a clean it up a bit and so so there it is so so clearly this kind of comparison we can compare the current year to the prior year the current month to the prior month the current quarter to the crack prior quarter the current quarter to the prior quarter of the prior year right we can we could think about how to construct all those different kind of comparisons which might be useful types of tools and then we can also think of these kind of comparative reports on the income statement where we might want to have multiple months or multiple quarters and not only have the multiple quarters you might have quarter one two three four and then the total summing up all four quarters which gives you the yearly totals for the entire year so yeah again you have a whole lot of different reports once you start mixing and maxing combinations and comparisons either summing up or or taking the difference of different periods and when you think about presenting the data particularly like a bookkeeper I'm thinking at the end of a month the end of a quarter the end of a year you can save these reports save your balance sheet reports and and be able to produce them easily and then think about how you gonna batch them and present them because the presentation of them is half the battle even though we're not fighting anyone so just a gi Joe term here slang that's old but that presentation is half the job so you want to you want to make it look nice even though I'm not an expert on that but in case that's that we're going to more income statements in the future