Profit and Loss
See how we recommend structuring your income and expense accounts.
Overview
The purpose of your balance sheet is measure the company’s profitability. You must map your P&L to general ledger accounts from your accounting system to automatically update with actuals.
Basics
P&L categories
The Francis template includes the classic P&L categories which can be found in most charts of accounts from accounting systems. That way, we’ve made it easy to map your general ledger accounts to the template P&L.
The template P&L includes margins such as gross margin and profit margin. For these formulas, we’ve used the ignore_div_zero() function to just return zero in periods where revenue is equal to zero. We do so to avoid #DIV!/0 errors. In addition, we recommend that you summarize margins by weighted averages in the total column to the right.
Driver-based forecating
Typically, some P&L items are forecasted using drivers. You can set up drivers in other tabs and have P&L forecasts reference those.
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