P&L, Cash Flow, Balance Sheets in One Click

The reports that change decisions

• Profit and loss by month, so a bad month is visible as a break in a line rather than a number in isolation.
• Revenue by client, which almost always reveals a concentration risk the owner had not quantified.
• Expenses by category over time, where drift shows up long before it shows up in the bank balance.
• Receivables ageing, which is the single best predictor of a cash-flow problem.
• Margin by product or service, which most businesses cannot produce and which usually changes what they sell.

The reports other people need

Your accountant wants transactions in a structure that imports cleanly — CSV, or a format shaped for QuickBooks or Sage — with categories intact and periods closed. A lender or grant programme wants a history: consistent monthly figures over a stretch of time, which is why businesses are usually turned down for being unable to evidence a track record rather than for not having one.

The Nigeria Revenue Service wants records that support the return you filed and the reliefs you claimed. That is a documentation requirement more than a reporting one, but it is satisfied by the same discipline.

Reading a P&L when you have not been taught to

Three lines carry most of the meaning. Revenue tells you how much work you did. Gross profit tells you whether the work was priced properly. Net profit tells you whether the business around the work is affordable.

A business with growing revenue and flat gross profit has a pricing problem. One with healthy gross profit and thin net profit has an overhead problem. Those are different fixes, and reading only the top or bottom line will send you at the wrong one.