P&L Reporting
Stienie
Member Posts: 9
Hi, I am migrating some of my clients from QuickBooks to Wave, to minimize the amount of capturing. However they have become used to the way the Profit & Loss report was and require the same report. I cannot seem to figure out how to generate a P&L for the year to date, but with all the months as separate columns for comparison purposes?
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Hi @Stienie.
You can compare two periods in the P&L report by clicking on Compare to a prior period in the box at the top of the screen. This will allow you to compare two periods, side-by-side. It isn't currently possible to compare more than two periods at the time, however.
Thanks Alexia! Do you know whether this is something that will be addressed in the near future? In am really keen to move all my customers across to Wave, but unfortunately this is a requirement for them!
Well, @Stienie, we are working on a new way to export a few of your reports, including the P&L report, that will allow you to see and compare your monthly numbers in side-by-side as your clients need.
I can't tell you exactly when that feature will be available, but our engineers are working on it, and aiming at making it a truly awesome tool while making sure to prioritize integrity the accuracy of your data. If you're curious about what else we have in the works, check out this article from our Help Center.
@Stienie Could you also let us know whether this type of functionality is an expectation of your customer base to exist in the web interface, in PDF, or CSV (spreadsheet)? At the moment, our thinking is that these types of more granular analyses are best done in spreadsheet software, so we're looking to enable it via CSV export only. We'd love your feedback and thoughts on that.
@Mani Any method of doing this would be EXCELLENT compared to none. Many small businesses need this sort of thing on a regular basis- "How is our track record?" Is an important question, and it is not something you want to spend a lot of time figuring out, this is probably the 2nd most important function of accounting (1st is getting $$ in), 2nd is comparing our overall productivity. I would love to do it via CSV, having it on the web, would be nice as well, but whichever method is the easiest for Wave to implement, I hope it is done as soon as feasible.
@Mani So sorry to only get back to you so late! I agree that a CSV or Excel format would be really great!
To add: I find that most of my clients have bad cash management just because they look at the P&L regularly, but never follow through to the Balance Sheet!
Also: My clients tend to be so busy with the forefront of their businesses that they have very little time to work through separate P&L, Balance sheets and Cash flow statements. To add value I use a "dashboard-report" that's basically the full TB, per account, with the net movement for the month (monthly next to each other for the financial year).
It's basically the P&L report Stienie asked for, just for the whole TB from which you can actually "read" the net profit, balance sheet, cash flow and track variances al in one place.
The only thing is to get it from Wave I need to repeatedly select dates for the month on the GL report, export to Excel, change some plus/minus signs depending on the type of account and whether the balance is "positive/negative" according to the expected "debit/credit" and then place the amounts into a prepared grid (off-Wave-in-Excel).
Shoe!
Am I missing something? Is there an easier way to get a "per-month-per-account-movement-grid-report" out of Wave? With the positive and negative amounts corresponding to debits (+) and credits (-) as per an accounting TB?
Is this P&L you are developing a precursor to something similar? Is the database of transactions in Wave not maybe in such a state that it can be extracted easily (even if it's not an official report, but maybe just an export option?)
Maybe too many questions for one response, so please contact me directly if you need some clarification or if I can open a line of communication about this by email or phone.
Thanks!
Was this ever implemented? I only see a way to compare two time periods, but not more than two months for the year-to-date. Thanks!
Hi @get_real . Currently, you can only compare two direct periods to each other. You can export these compared periods to a .csv file and open them in excel, exporting other periods the same way and also opening them in excel. This would allow you to compare other numerous periods although it definitely is a workaround which requires a bit of manipulation on your end.
Ah dude, there is a better way (but also has issues).
There is an official google sheets integration that will give you periodic reports (i.e. monthly). Just hit integrations on the menu and follow instructions.
The issue with it is the numbers are in text format not as numbers which is rather a daft thing to have done. Still, converting text to numbers to graph etc is going to be a lot less painful than exporting period by period.
I can't believe this is not a feature yet
I installed the Google sheet integration but I do not see he to get the reports to Drive.