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Profit and loss (P&L) reports make it easy to analyze your business’s revenues and expenses. Available to view in Quickbooks, they consist of all recorded financial transactions for a given period. You can run a P&L report to see how much money your business earned and how much money your business spent during a given period. When running a P&L report, though, there’s a chance that one or more transactions will be missing from it. How do you resolve missing transactions in a P&L report exactly?

Check Accounts Receivable and Bank Accounts

If you’re missing one or more transactions in a P&L report, you should check your accounts receivable and bank accounts. While most transactions should appear automatically in the P&L report — assuming they occurred during that time — this doesn’t apply to all transactions. Customer payments, for example, may only appear in your accounts receivable or bank account. Quickbooks won’t display them in P&L reports.

Look for Bill Payments

Another type of transaction that may not appear in a P&L report is bill payments. Bill payments are expenses that involve your business paying a service provider. Common types of bill payments include utilities, internet service, marketing services and more. When you come across a missing transaction in a P&L report, you should consider whether or not it’s a bill payment. Bill payments will only appear in your accounts payable or bank account. Like with customer payments, Quickbooks won’t display them in P&L reports.

Consider Deposits

You should consider whether or not a transaction is a deposit if it’s missing from a P&L report. Deposits will only appear in a P&L report if they are linked to an income account. If there’s a transaction that’s not linked to an income account, Quickbooks won’t display it in P&L reports. Of course, you can avoid this headache by using Quickbooks’ invoice and payments system. The invoice and payments system will automatically record deposits appropriately.

It’s frustrating when you run a P&L report, only to discover that it’s missing a transaction. Maybe the transaction is a customer payment, or perhaps it’s a bill payment. Regardless, you should take the time to resolve the missing transaction so that it doesn’t throw off your business’s financial records.

Did this tutorial work for you? Let us know in the comments section below!