Hi, I have been playing around with trying to create report that shows the gross income over the lifetime of the business broken down by each month. So showing the total money in (ignoring expenses/payments) up to 5th May 2017, 5th June 2017 and so on.
I have already set up a profit loss statement that is broken up into each month (see screenshot). It would be really useful to be able to add a total for the gross income for each monthly column to this, or just to create a separate report that would display this info.
Sorry I realise that wasn’t all that clear, I found it difficult to explain exactly what I mean.
What I am looking to do is create a new total row that shows the total gross income since the start of trading up to the corresponding month column. So month two of trading would show month 1 + month 2, the third month of trading month 1 + 2 + 3 and so on.
The existing “Total Income” row shows the total gross income for each month individually, which is very useful especially when there is a combination of fixed price and billable time jobs. However I would like to add an additional total that shows what has come into the business up to the corresponding month as well.
That is simple. Edit the Profit and Loss Statement you already have. But rather than setting the date range for each column to begin on the first of sequential months, have them all begin on the same date, the beginning date of your business. Change the end dates a month at a time. So, for example, the first column would be for May 1, 2017 through May 31, 2017. The second would be from May 1, 2017 through June 30, 2017; then through July 31, August 31, etc.
I will say, this is going to get pretty tedious as time goes on. After five years, you’ll have 60 columns. This is the sort of things that might be handled more easily in a spreadsheet, transferring only your income total every month. A simple summation would give you the numbers. Then you could plot a graph, too.
Of course, it’s so obvious now you say it! I got a little caught up in trying to display all of the figures on one report. I was originally looking at trying to do it through the Chart of Accounts with Groups / Totals, but making a separate report for the accumulative totals makes much more sense.
Agreed it is a little tedious doing it this way especially over time, but it us useful to have all of the the numbers in one application / format. I may well look into moving this into a spreadsheet in the future.
@Davide Thanks for the input, sounds like a great idea. I will look into it!
