The Simple P&L is a great starting point for understanding your business (or personal) cashflow. It’s a dynamic template that allows you to control the report’s date settings to view your income, expenses, and cash flow for a specific time period.

Some easy preset time settings will report out your financial data for this year by month, this year by quarter, last year by month, last year by quarter, year to date, last 12 months, last 12 months, and past 5 years. There is also a custom setting that allows you to pick a specific start date, time interval, and number of periods to fully customize this report for your needs.

The handy chart at the top visualizes your cash flow over the report’s configured time period so you get a picture of how your business is doing over time.

The Cash Flow Summary at the top gives you a quick glance at your total income, expense, and cash flow for the selected time period.

The Simple P&L pulls data from your Transactions sheet and is based on your categorized actuals. Make sure that you have transaction data categorized in the Transactions sheet.

It breaks down your transactions by Type (Income or Expense), Group (custom “buckets” you assign to categories), and Category. It will not show categories that you have marked as “hide” on the Categories sheet in the “Hide from reports” column and will not show Transfer type categories (categories with the Transfer type set in the Type column on the Categories sheet).

Review the data in the report table or customize the time settings to review the data for a specific time period.

The report can display up to 24 periods. There are a few default time settings plus a custom option.

Cash flow in the Simple P&L is calculated as the difference between your income and expenses and is based on how things are categorized in your Transactions sheet. Cashflow = income minus expenses.

If you’re not seeing your cash flow reflecting what you’d expect we recommend reviewing how your transactions are categorized for the configured time period.

The Simple P&L does not show transactions that are categorized with Transfer type categories. In some situations these transfers may impact your true cash flow and account balances. We recommend talking with an accountant or tax professional about what categories to use and how best to categorize your transactions if your numbers aren’t quite adding up the way you’d expect and you commonly have transfers.

Check out Tiller’s Financial Professionals Directory to see a list of professionals that are familiar with Tiller if you're not currently working with a financial professional.

If you need to share your Simple P&L with your accountant or business partner there are two ways to go about it.

If you’re using Google Sheets you can easily share with view only access your Google Sheet using the Share button in the upper right corner of the spreadsheet. If you’re using Microsoft Excel make sure that your workbook is stored on your OneDrive and use the collaboration features built into Excel to share.

If you don’t want to give them access to the entire spreadsheet you can print to PDF from the File menu. Just be sure to choose PDF as the printer. The print dialog settings will allow you to choose whether you want to print the entire sheet (just the one Simple P&L tab) or just the selected cells in the P&L so be sure to decide what specific portion of the Simple P&L you want to print before going into the print settings.

A third option is to use the built in IMPORTRANGE feature in Google Sheets to share a separate Google Sheet where you’re using IMPORTANGE to pull in the Simple P&L and share that separate spreadsheet with a collaborator.