What is a Profit and Loss statement?

Owning a business comes with a lot of responsibilities. You may find wondering sometimes how do you know if your business is growing? How do you calculate how much you are bringing in your company? How do you report the financial operations? There are three main financial statements you need as a business owner, a cash flow statement, balance sheet statement, and a profit and loss statement. Today, we will be focusing on the profit and loss statement.

What is a profit and loss statement? A profit and loss statement is a financial summary of your company’s operations from a certain period of time. The main operational transactions are revenues, expenses, and net income. The formula for the profit and loss statement is subtracting the total expenses from the total revenues then the difference will identify the net income of the company.

The revenue is the sales generated from what your company sells such as products or services. Then, you have your expenses. The expenses are what you subtract from the revenue that your company makes. The expenses include the cost of goods sold and operating expenses. They are the variable and fixed expenses that manufactures the company’s products and services production. The expense also includes the taxes, interest expense from loans, and other periodic payments. 

After subtracting the expenses from the company’s revenue, you finally have your net income. This will help measure the results of how well your business is performing financially from a certain period of time. Is your company earning profit? Is your company actually losing money? How can your company perform better financially? A profit and loss statement will help identify and analyze your finances.