Profit and Loss Report- for all customers

Hi,

  1. I have 85 customers for which i want to create a Profit and loss report. do i have to add 85 lines one after other, manually or there is a quicker way of generating report for all my customer?
  2. Also. the Report format is Landscape which results into a very long Horizontal page for such a huge number of customers. Is there a way to create this report in portrait page layout .
  3. Is it possible to add a column of % profitability along with Profit?

regards

Wow… a P&L for customers will always be a huge report. Have you considered doing it for type instead of customers? For example, if your company is providing 3 services you could create it by “Service #1”, “Service #2” and “Service #3”. I have some experience creating this kind of report and it is never easy doing it in an accounting program. I use to do it for a client in Excel, creating “jobs”. In Manager you could try the “Tracking Codes” and create a Profit & Loss using the option to display it for Tracking Code. Or maybe if it is really necessary, you could create a tracking code for every client.

What report are you referring to? There is no such report as a P&L for customers, whether one or several.

Only in my dreams!

Hi, thanks. I am using tracking codes for the customers. but still while creating P & L statement, i will have to create one line for each tracking code which is cumbersome. i want the Profit or loss % on each customer to see how we performed on each customer. please advise from your experience if this is a limitation of Manager. many thanks

Hi Jon and Tut Leader,
Many thanks for your reply. I was referring P&L statement for all customer using tracking codes (in reports section). Sorry if this was not conveyed effectively in my earlier post.

Profitability per customer is non-sense. Unless you have like 2-3 customers.

If you have 85 customers, how do you want to track profitability? The business has generally a lot of costs. For example, rent, electricity, wages etc. If you want to get profitability per customer, you would have to split each cost among all your customers based on some formula. With 85 customers, this would be very cumbersome undertaking and not worth the benefit.

Anyway, to get profitability by customer, tracking codes is the way to go. But you shouldn’t have 85 tracking codes. Split your customers into 3-4 divisions so you only have 3-4 tracking codes. This makes it easier to split all the costs among 3-4 divisions. And you can get profitability by division.

That is unless you don’t care about the costs and only want to see revenue totals by customer. But then you should be more specific and say you need income totals by customer (not profitability).

Okay, I didn’t start this thread, but I need income totals by customer. :blush: [I asked a while back] (SQL schema for creating custom reports - #6 by Jon), but I’ve been waiting for documentation of Custom Reports so I can get it. I imagine I’ll also be able to get it easier via Excel once the G/L Transactions spreadsheet export is implemented.

Exactly. That’s what I do. But like you said, there is many cost that sometimes are not easy to keep track. I created a template a while ago for this, keep the direct cost that affect a specific client on their tracking code or job code and the costs that are not easy to put in just one client, or maybe are part of the general operation, I assign them to an “Overhead” code. Exactly, like cost accounting. That way you can divide all overhead for all your clients / divisions / projects and obtain a real result that in my case, I was using for management and see real profitability for each project.

BTW, it would be nice to have a column for “transaction code” or something like that in the General Ledger Report.

Hi,
In our case we consider common overheads in Operations expenses and this becomes part of net profit calculation.
While generating report (profit and Loss) for my 85 customers i faced few problems which i consider as OFIs ( Opportunity For Improvement, unless this is already available and i am not aware of)

  1. For 85 + customers (Tracking codes) , i need to add 85+ lines when i want to create a report. i suggest to create a single button to generate report for all tracking codes in given date range.
  2. Calculate % profit or loss.
  3. The current report format is Horizontal where tracking codes are in first row, whereas a vertical format ( tracking codes in one column) will be user friendly.

Day by Day our business is increasing and i like Manager as a tool to maintain my accounts. ( we have a cloud version) I am eager to see these improvements or your suggestion to keep it as our long standing accounting software.

Tracking codes are really not meant for this purpose. I seriously doubt you will see a feature added to automatically create a P&L report divided into 85 or more categories. Tracking codes are intended for divisions of the business, despite the fact that they can be used creatively in other ways.

Businesses define profitability in many different ways. However you do it, and whatever parameters you include, I can promise you there are dozens, possibly hundreds, of ways others might want to make such a calculation. Accounting is one thing. Analysis of accounting results is something else. Trying to anticipate all possible analyses users might want would result in terrible software bloat.

Only for those who are misusing the capability. And instead of customers being spread horizontally across many pages, your income and expense accounts would be.

I think most accounting professionals would agree it is unrealistic to attempt profitability calculations on individual customers when there are so many. A few categories might be meaningful, and for that you could use tracking codes. 85 customers (and presumably growing) is not so realistic. The effort of apportioning expenses across 85 customers in a rational way is just too great. If this is, in fact, critical to management of your business, Manager is probably the wrong software for you.

The whole point of marking up your products is to achieve a certain gross profit or net profit percentage. Once you have worked out the right mark up you should know within reason how much profit you are making from a customer.