P&L By Division Report - enhancement

There is a report format built into QuickBooks Desktop that I use often: Profit & Loss By Class. In Manager, this report would be called Profit & Loss by Division.

== How the P&L By Class Report works in Quickbooks ==

• For an entity with three classes C1, C2, and C3 (for example), QuickBooks constructs a report with four columns: C1, C2, C3, and TOTAL.

• If I have forgotten to assign an income or expense item to a class, QuickBooks automatically adds a fifth column between C3 and TOTAL called Unclassified and puts the item there.

== Creating a P&L By Division Report in Manager ==

• For an entity with three divisions D1, D2, and D3 (for example), I can define a P&L report with four columns: D1, D2, D3, and TOTAL. I repurpose the main column for D1, and repurpose the comparative columns for D2, D3, and TOTAL. Column 1 is assigned to division D1, column 2 is assigned to division D2, column 3 is assigned to division D3, and column 4 is not assigned to a division.

There are a couple of problems with this workaround, one minor and one major.

(1) Minor problem: the entries in the leftmost column (assigned to D1) are shown in bold type, because this is supposed to be the main column rather than a comparative column. However, for my workaround report there is no reason why D1 column entries are any more important than the entries for any other division.

(2) Major problem: if I’ve forgotten to assign an income or expense item to a division, then it won’t appear in any column D1, D2, or D3, and the division columns will not in fact add up to the TOTAL column. The solution is to ALWAYS run a Division Exception Report before generating my workaround P&L By Division Report in Manager.

If Manager supported a built-in P&L by Division Report, I would never need to run a Division Exception Report: just glancing at the P&L By Division Report would immediately indicate that there’s a problem if an “unclassified” (or “unassigned”) column has been added.

== Disclaimer ==

I’m new to Manager, so I apologize in advance if Manager does in fact directly support something like the “P&L By Division” report.

The report in Manager are what-you-see-is-what-you-get (a.k.a WYSIWYG), so any columns that were not defined in the edit screen will not show on the report.

The way I see the problem is that there’s no way to set a column as undefined divisions.

However, Manager has a way to identify those using Division Exception Report.

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