Reports, Accounts, Spreadsheet (Monthly Profit & Loss)

To run the “Spreadsheet” report, starting from the “Accounts Menu”…

· Click the “Reports” button

· Click the “Spreadsheet” button

· Select the financial year

· Click the “OK” button

The Monthly Spreadsheet shows all your nominal account monthly totals for a given year, with the net monthly profit or loss at the bottom. It is essentially a different version of the “Profit & Loss” report that displays each nominal account with twelve monthly totals instead of just one annual one. It allows you to see which nominal accounts most affect your income and outgoing (e.g. Pensions, Motor Insurance, Fee Work, Wages, Advertising, etc) and also to quickly detect trends.

Set-up

You control which nominal accounts to include in the Spreadsheet when setting-up your nominal accounts (see “Accounts, Set-up Nominal Accounts”), via the “Include in spreadsheet” dropdown. As a rule you should…

· include all purchase and sales nominal accounts

· exclude all control and bank accounts with the exception of any controls for “Commission in suspense” or “Transferable commission”

During the nominal account set-up you can also specify monthly budget figures. Provided you have established these then when running the Spreadsheet you can select…

Projections only	for the monthly nominal budget figures
Actual figures only	for the real monthly nominal totals
Actual figures then projected	for actual to the current date followed by budget ones
Actual & projected difference	for actual less budget figures for each month

The “Actual & projected difference” option is particularly useful as it highlights the extent to which your real business activity differs from the planned budget. If the report is covered in blanks you will have been 100% successful in matching your projected budgets. Your failures will be indicated by the presence of any large figures.