This is a guest post by Yogesh, a chartered accountant and excel blogger.
![P&L Reporting using Excel [Part 1 of 6 on Excel & Accounting]](https://chandoo.org/img/ea/excel-accounting-pl-reports-1.png "P&L Reporting using Excel [Part 1 of 6 on Excel & Accounting]")
With this post we are starting a new series on how to do basic accounting in Microsoft Excel.
In this and next 5 posts, we will aim to setup Profit & Loss account reporting for multi-location retail company.
During this series we will learn how to make P&L reports on various criteria with just few clicks.
Many users find it difficult to manage their P&L reporting for Multi Location organization.
We will be using Pivot Tables for our reporting purpose and will take example of a Retails chain with multiple locations divided into various regions. It is recommended that you be familiar with the concept of pivot tables and also familiar with basic accounting terms.
Topics covered in this series:
Data sheet structure for Preparing P&L using Pivot Tables
Preparing Pivot Table P&L using Data sheet
Adding Calculated Fields to Pivot Table P&L
Exploring Pivot Table P&L Reports
Quarterly and Half yearly Profit Loss Reports in Excel
Budget V/s Actual Profit Loss Report using Pivot Tables
Do not think that series is not only about the Profit and Loss Account. This is also about Pivot Tables. We will cover many Pivot Table tricks during our series. I hope you will be able to use those tricks elsewhere too.
Data sheet structure for Preparing P&L using Pivot Tables
Data is most important part of the entire reporting requirements. You should plan your reporting needs in advance and collect data accordingly. Initial investments in organizing data properly will help you in long run for your reporting requirements.
Data needs to be in table format on separate sheet. First row of the data should be table headers and following rows to contain the data.
You need to have all the possible dimensions in your data. This will help you to quickly change your P&L report on different dimensions.
A dimension is defined as “…a data element that categorizes each item in a data set into non-overlapping regions” according to Wikipedia.
The above data structure will give us flexibility to prepare P&L report by,
- Geography-wise
- State-wise
- City-wise
- Store-wise
- Month-wise – This can be further grouped on Quarterly / Six Monthly / Yearly reporting
Calendar related data points should be entered as date. You can see that the month column in the data is showing Jan.2009 but it is actually entered as date January 31, 2009 then formatted as MMM.YYYY
This gives you flexibility to group data by quarterly / Six Monthly / Yearly for reporting. [learn more about grouping dates in pivot reports]
It is advisable to have it as last date of the month; this gives you further flexibility to do calculations based on number of days during the month.
There is no need to have calculated data in your data table, you may notice that I do not have calculated figures in the data sheet. Data points like Gross Margins, Margin % , Operating Profit and Operating Profit % will be calculated in Pivot Table using calculated field option.
During this series we will cover how to make P&L report on these dimensions using sample data. You can download sample data for practice along with our posts.
Download this Data:
Click here to download this data file in .xls format. We will use this data in next part to prepare our initial pivot table.
This data is prepared using RANDBETWEEN function of Excel for usage in this series.
What Next?
In the next part of this series, learn how to make a pivot table for Profit Loss Reporting using this data.
Added by PHD:
- I know as much about accounting as a cow knows about pie charts. So I asked Yogesh, a CA with vast experience and passion for excel, to write for us. I am very thankful to him for accepting this offer and sharing his knowledge.
- Please share your feedback and ideas for this series using comments. Yogesh and I will reply to your questions. Also, say thanks if you like the idea and want to learn more.
- Sign-up for PHD E-mail newsletter so that you don’t miss any new posts
Yogesh is an accountant with 13 years of experience in India and abroad. His specialties are budgeting and costing, supplier accounting, negotiation of contracts, cost benefit analysis, MIS reporting, employees accounting. He writes about excel at http://www.yogeshguptaonline.com/
7 Responses to “Project Dashboard + Tweetboard = pure awesomeness!!!”
I would like to see actual hash-tagged DM tweets go out to the specific information consumers. That would be an interesting way to communicate the key daily data to interested parties.
A Twitter-like secure application like Yammer might be a good fit with this.
For example, how about daily tweets to selected user groups (secure) that would display sales, bookings, cash receipts, cash disbursed and a second version that would show the same info for MTD, QTD or YTD figures.
@Dan, it would be great. I did not taught about implementing it on this dashboard because twitter is blocked to the whole intranet here. However, there's a discussion here about how can we send these tweets to blackberries (probably through e-mail) automatically. (I'd like to see this implemented on a jabber restricted network as well, but here it'll probably not happen)
The wrap-up versions you mentioned doesn't apply to my particular scenario, but on a sales tweetboard it would be a great tool indeed - choosing who will receive which message according to hashtags. I'll think on something, thanks for the advice. 🙂
(Ah, btw, I'm Fernando... 🙂 )
@Dan: That is a fun idea. Instead of tightly integrating twitter functionality with a dashboard, i think it would be cool if we have a "tweet this" button that users can click after selecting a range of cells. We can easily show a dialog with the concatenated output of the selected cells and ask user to edit the text and eventually "send to twitter".
For eg. you can select the annual sales figure cell and click on "tweet this" button upon which a dialog will show the value. Then you can pre-pend it something like "DM @boss look at our sales this year: "
@Aires.. thanks once again.
Wow it looks really good. Not sure though how much the tweet facility would help in real world project management, but certainly having a dashboard on a project should be a key deliverable when learning how to manage a project
The other use of this is during the software development life cycle especially when you have parallel streams of development and testing going on. Using a dashboard is a quick way for everyone on the team to see where the project is at and how it all fits together.
Regards
Susan de Sousa
Site Editor http://www.my-project-management-expert.com
Hi Chandoo,
I purchased the project management toolkit but the dashboard shown above with the imbedded scroll bars. Is it included in the project pack??
Thanks
Sue
The gantt chart section of this dashboard is similar to one I have recently created: http://xlcalibre.com/hr-dashboard-gantt-chart-traffic-light-reportIt has a similar approach with scroll bars, but has a couple of additional features. I've tried to incorporate a traffic light report element, and also allow the timescale to adjusted so that can view it by days, weeks or months.I really like the other tables that you've incorporated, I may well try to replicate them to improve my version!
I am a monitoring and evaluation consultant in international development, and one of the services I offer is to help non-profits and foundations develop performance dashboards. I often advise them to develop dashboards for ongoing programs, rather than for one-time or pilot projects, because of the time involved. I am trying to find out from a few people how long it takes you to develop a project management dashboard, and to what extent the indicators vary from one project to the next.