profit & loss : help needed!

sertav

Hi everyone

Need help making a basic profit & loss sheet. Unsure on how it would need to be structured and what to put where… Already booked in a ‘financials’ course to learn how to do and interpret these sort of things!

The company is brand new and hasn’t started trading yet (ie, no clients and/or sales). It’s due to be ‘launched’ in early 2006.

Company transactions so far:

Start-up expenses: 50
Employers Liability Insurance: 350
Webspace and domain name: 260
Printers: 35
Accommodation: 1600
Renovation materials: 150

The accommodation is a residential property where future company employees will be living if and when necessary. The £1600 results from £800 rent plus a deposit of another £800. The renovation materials relate to work that needed to be done at the property.

Any kind souls out there willing to help out?

Many thanks!

Lawbag_2

a lot of what you have mentioned above should appear on the balance sheet, not profit and loss.

PM me if you need any help, or Im sure someone else will elaborate

macca64

Do you have Microsoft excel on your computer?? If so keep a record of your Profit & Loss Account and Balance Sheet in there.

The deposit for accommodation is an asset, should be classed as a current asset.

Some of the other items could be capitalised and included on the balance sheet, otherwise you can write them off to the P&L straight away (eg. printers and domain).

If you need any more help, let me know. I can knock something up in excel fairly quickly if you want.

grumpyoldgit_2

Hi
PM me and I will send you an Excel exercise on creating a P&L sheet supplied as part of Excel small business tools (hope that is allowed?) - I guess it will be somehwere on the web as a download in any event.
Never used it as I use Quickbooks which does all this automatically but it looks OK from a quick review.
GoG

tomstickland

Webspace and domain name: 260

Not on topic, but that's a lot of money to pay when you can buy a domain for 2 years at £10 from fasthosts and hosting is £8 per month for a business user.

sertav

That's true but I should have written domains because it regards multiple tld's. As for the webspace I need a fairly specialist setup that, inevitably, carries a premium. Top notch though!

rammell

For the amounts of money you seem to be spending setting up this new business, I would suggest that an investment from as little as £50 on Quickbooks would be money well spent. You really don't have to think about P&Ls and Balance Sheets as the software does it all for you.

Just make sure you record everything in whatever system you use as soon after spending money/recieving money as possible. Once you start leaving things for a few days/weeks, it can be very stressful to catch up. And, remember to do your bank account reconcilliations every month also! I speak from experience!!

DonkeyKong77

Hi
Can anyone tell me what quickbooks is? Sorry if it's a daft question - i am assuming its some sort of accountancy software.

The thing is i am helping out a small business, with regards to marketing - but they have asked about p&l's, cash flows etc, which i know of and can do but is there a recommended piece of softwar (quickbooks?) that would make life easier.

Currently, for a cash flow i just looked up a template via microsoft office online - whih cis ok but its not great if that is the only resource i know!

Thanks

rammell

Amongst the accounting/book-keeping software used by small businesses, Sage Accounting and Intuit Quickbooks must be the 2 most popular. This is only my opinion but it seems that those that recommend Sage Accounting do so because a high proportion of accountancy firms use the high-spec professional version of Sage, as do many large corporations. Those that recommend Quickbooks do so because of its lower cost and arguably easier-to-use interface.

I started off using Sage Instant Accounts (a bundle of low-end Sage Accounts with Sage Payroll) and was not impressed with it. Although I was very familiar with accounting terms and accounting processes, I found Sage difficult to use and very difficult to manipulate my data and produce my onw reports etc. My accountant actually recommended I switch to Quickbooks and gave me a demo.... much easier to do things with your data.

If you want more info, do a Google search or go to http://www.intuitshop.co.uk/ . £34 will but you the basic SimpleStart version of Quickbooks with the regular version coming in at £127.

I know an aweful lot of businesses do their book-keeping using Excel spreadsheets with appropriate templates. My personal view is that an investment of £127 is money well spent for such a critical part of one's business and will make a massive impact on effort required to maintain the books.

Hope this helps.

DonkeyKong77

Thanks for that - will look into it.

What's the difference between the Bssic £34 version and the regular £120 version - i know thats what the owner will say!

Am fed up of using excel templates already (accidently deleting formulae - then re-entering etc) - and i wont be there for long so if it is recommened then i will suggest purchasing it - especially if you dont have to be a finance wizard in the first place.

I get the impression that SME business is somewhat different to what i was "taught" at uni - not that it's my thing but it was more about IRR, ROI's etc.

The business basically wants to keep track of the costs, whether its making a profit/loss etc and if Quickbooks can help do that then it should be ok.

Chippy_Minton

DonkeyKong77 wrote:

What's the difference between the Bssic £34 version and the regular £120 version - i know thats what the owner will say!

See http://quickbooks.intuit.com/commerce/catalog/fragments/quickbooks/2006/products/compchart_qb.jhtml