Almost every real decision in a small business — can I take on someone, is that client worth keeping, can I afford the bigger premises — comes down to one question: did we make money, and where did it go? The Profit & Loss report is that answer, written out. It takes everything you have recorded and lays it out for any period you choose: what you earned, what those sales cost you, what you spent keeping the doors open, and what was left at the end.
Its real value is in the comparison, not the single number. Run it month by month and a slide you spot in March is still a March problem you can fix. Run it once a year, at year end, and you are reading a post-mortem.
What to know before you trust the number
- stub counts an invoice on the day you send it, not the day you get paid. This is the most common question support gets about this report: profit looks healthy, the bank account is empty. Both are true. Profit & Loss tells you what you earned; the money is sitting in invoices your customers have not paid yet. Cash Flow, plus what is still outstanding under Sales, tells you the other half.
- The report is only as truthful as your categorisation. It is built entirely from your categorised transactions. stub warns you at the top of the report when you have uncategorised transactions or missing opening balances — both will throw the figures out, and both are fixable in a few minutes.
- A tag is what turns one company-wide number into a per-project one. If you run jobs, branches or campaigns and tag as you go, this report will show them side by side. Without tags, everything lands in a single column and you cannot tell the profitable work from the work that is quietly costing you.
- "Cost of sales" and "expenses" are not the same thing. Cost of sales is what the things you sold cost you; expenses are what it costs to exist — rent, salaries, software, advertising. Splitting them is what makes gross profit meaningful.
Where to find it
Head to Insights, click the report name at the top of the page and pick Profit & Loss from the picker — or choose it from Reports in the sidebar. The date control at the top sets the period you're looking at.
Compare periods
Use the Compare selector:
- None — one column for the whole period.
- Monthly — a column per month, so you can see the trend.
- Yearly — a column per financial year.
- By tag — a column per tag, so your projects or branches sit side by side. This one only appears once you have tags set up.
Filter by tag
Use the Tag filter in the header to show one project, branch or campaign on its own. (The filter is hidden in By tag mode, because the columns are already split that way.)
Read the report
Top to bottom, it tells the story of your period:
- Income — everything you earned in the period, including invoices you have sent but not yet been paid for.
- Cost of sales — what the things you sold actually cost you.
- Gross profit — income less cost of sales. What's left before your running costs.
- Expenses — the costs of keeping the business going: rent, salaries, software, advertising.
- Net profit — what's left at the end. Your bottom line.
Download it
Click ··· → Download, pick PDF or CSV, set the dates and download — the details are in Export & share a report. For a full pack to hand to a bank or an accountant, click ··· → Financial statements instead.
If the numbers look wrong
- Check the warnings at the top of the report — uncategorised transactions and missing opening balances are the two usual culprits.
- Profit high but bank account empty? See the note above: profit counts invoices when you send them, not when you get paid. Check Cash Flow, and check what's still outstanding under Sales.
- Work the full checklist in When report numbers look wrong.
Tip: Look at this monthly, not annually. A trend you spot in March is a problem you can still fix.