Profit and loss report (P&L)

What the report shows

Profit and loss is a report on the company's financial result for a chosen period. It collects every income and expense by cash document article, spreads them across periods, and shows the resulting profit at the bottom.

Unlike the other financial reports, it counts amounts by the date the service was provided or the product ordered, not by the payment date - more on that below.

The report is commonly abbreviated to P&L, PnL or PNL, from Profit and Loss. In Wlaunch it is labelled exactly that way: "Profit and loss (P&L)".

You will find it in the Reports section, in the Financial reporting group.

Event date, not payment date

This is the most important characteristic of the report, and it is exactly what sets it apart from the rest of the financial reporting.

P&L is built on the date of the event itself: when the service was provided and when the product was ordered. Not on the date they were actually paid for. It is the only financial report in Wlaunch that works this way - every other one is built on the dates money moved through the cash register.

The consequence is simple, but easy to miss:

• a prepayment made in April for a service provided in May lands in May;
• a service provided in April and paid for in June still stays in April.

So P&L answers the question "how much did the company earn over the period", not "how much money came into the cash register over the period". If you need the latter, look at the cash flow report.

How to read the table

The table is laid out like this:

• Rows are cash document articles, grouped into two blocks: Income and Expenses. For example "Provision of services", "Membership sales" and "Product sales" under income, and "Purchase of goods and materials" or "Interest payment" under expenses.
• Columns are periods. Each period has two columns: the amount in the currency and a %.
• Total is an extra column summing the whole range. It appears only when there is more than one period: on a single-day report there is nothing to total across.
• Profit is a pinned row at the bottom: income minus expenses for each period. A negative value means a loss for that period.

The "%" column is calculated against the income of the same period, not against its own block's total. So income rows stay within 100%, while expenses can easily go past it: 584% in a column means that month's expenses were almost six times its takings.

Any amounts that belong to no article are collected into a separate "Not distributed" row.

Period and granularity

The period is set the usual way for reports: two date fields, arrows to step back and forward, and a list of presets - Custom, Week, Month, Quarter, Year.

The report opens on the current quarter - three columns, convenient for a quick "how are we doing right now" glance. The maximum range is one year.

You do not choose the column step, it is derived from the range:

So a quarter always gives three monthly columns, and a week gives seven daily ones.

Company or branch

In a company with several branches, a scope switch appears above the table: the whole company or one specific branch.

Branches that have already been deactivated stay in the list. That is deliberate: the report is historical, and a branch closed in the spring still traded during a range that covers the spring.

Several currencies

If the company keeps documents in more than one currency, the report does not mix them into a single sum. A separate table is built for each currency, and the currency with the largest turnover comes first.

Drill-down to a document

The main thing that sets this report apart from the other financial ones is that you can drill into it. To the left of every row there is a drill button with an icon, and it is the click on that button that opens the next level.

Level 2 - what the article is made of. The "Provision of services" row breaks down into individual services, "Product sales" into products, and "Membership sales" into membership templates. The period columns stay the same.

Level 3 - individual documents. The next click opens the list of lines that made up the amount: date, document number, client and amount. From here it is one more step to the cash document itself.

Drilling in always opens the report's entire range, not a single column: if the report covers July to September, the next level covers July to September too. The selected period and the column step do not change on the way down.

Export

The Export button saves the table to a file. It is available at every drill level, so you can export the summary report as well as an individual list of documents.

How it differs from the Financial results report

These two are easy to confuse, because both work with cash document articles. The differences are collected below, and the first one matters more than the rest:

In short: P&L answers "how did the company do over the period", while the financial results report answers "who brought in how much".