Profit and Loss Report By Department/Class

Summary

We have one company with one chart of accounts but two stores (or departments). How can I get a P & L for each store (or department)?

Question

We have one company with one chart of accounts but two stores (or departments). How can I get a P & L for each store (or department)?

Answer

You should set up classes for the company. First you have to turn on class tracking in your accounting preferences (Edit>Preferences>Accounting>Company Preferences). Then add two classes to the class list. Then tag every income and expense transaction with which class it belongs to. At that point, you can use the P&L by Class Report to show separate P&Ls for each department (class). Assuming all the data is already entered (without any class info), this might involve quite a bit of data changing. If you have a way to come up with the totals for each account by class, you could use a zero-dollar journal entry to move totals into each class. For example, you could create a journal entry that debits total sales (with nothing in the class column), and then credits sales twice for the total in each class (tagging the class column for each amount).