I’m just not sure where to post this, and I’ve searched the forums but I don’t know if I’m using the right search terms. I have business expenses and income that are in accounts that also have personal expenses and income. Is there a way to create a profit & loss statement with specific categories rather than all categories? When I search for category reports, I’m only finding ways to report on a single category rather than being able to select multiple categories.
I’ve tried using two pivot tables (one for the income categories and one below it for the expense categories) on one sheet with monthly or quarterly columns, and that almost works. The problem is that I have some months or quarters with no income from this business activity, so the columns don’t line up.
I’ve tried the simple business dashboard, and it doesn’t seem to allow me to select which categories are business related – it just summarizes all of my transactions, personal or business into one dashboard (do I not understand how to use it?).
I’ve also tried the profit and loss template, which similarly does not allow me to select which categories to include.
I’m probably missing some basic Tiller skill about how to make a sheet only report on selected categories. Or maybe I’m wishing for a feature that doesn’t exist!
easiest solution - go to categories tab and hide all personal categories in the “hide from reports” column and then re-run the p&l report. there are other solutions but start with this first then come back for more if you want.
Thanks Blake, but that’s not what I need. I regularly use several reports for my personal expenses, and turning off all the personal categories whenever I want to check business finances would be slow and clunky. I need a live, ongoing solution to be able to assess the business finances while other functions are still intact.
Isn’t there some way to make reports for selected categories and be able to display the data by monthly or quarterly columns? Do I have to learn to program to make tiller do this?
Maybe it’s possible I could use pivot tables to do this and put some dummy entries in my transaction sheet with zero as the amounts to make those months show up as zeros in the pivot tables?
I agree. I too would like to run a P&L with some hidden categories and not have to toggle them on/off each time. When you run a P&L report it would be nice if we had the option to customize the categories it ran the report with. Maybe @randy can make it happen since he’s good at making these quick fixes/updates to the templates.
I’m late with the update but I want to mention my proposed solution worked. I made a couple of dummy entries in my transactions sheet with zero as the amount and the revenue I wanted in the statement as the category. It works! It created zeros in the pivot table for those quarters, allowing the revenue pivot to line up right above the expense pivot and making a great income statement for that line of business.
