ContactsLaw allows you to produce a standard profit and loss report for the general ledger accounts.

The report lists all income and expense accounts with activity during the period, as well as the sum of debits and credits to each account. You can report by financial year, quarter or month, optionally including the previous financial year and/or same period in the previous year. The report also compares the actual figures to the account budgets, with the ability to view either the difference (dollars) or variance (percentage).

Cash accounting

Internally, ContactsLaw records debtor and creditor transactions on an accruals basis; however, there is provision to report profit and loss on a cash basis. In this mode, billing journals are mapped onto debtor receipts, and creditor/disbursement journals are mapped onto creditor payments.

This means that, for example, a debtor receipt (which normally debits the bank account and credits debtors) is instead reported against the income/expense accounts affected by the bill(s) to which it is allocated.

Chart

You can also display the profit and loss over a series of consecutive financial years (up to 5 in total) in chart form. You can display these either as a multi-series bar graph (comparing the months of the year) or as a line graph (showing the overall trend).

See also