As long as your P&L statement includes the seven pieces of information mentioned earlier in this chapter, you have a lot of flexibility about how to format that statement based on business needs. After Lisa is in business for more than a year, she may want to do a P&L statement that compares January 2010 to January 2011 and so on through the year in addition to comparing to the previous month. She can do that by adding an additional column.

She may also find it useful to compare quarter to quarter both for the current year and the previous year. Usually a business that wants to look at the numbers quarterly will do statements, one for the current month and a separate one for the quarter.

You also might want to set up a series of reports based on the P&L that tracks certain trends, such as your Sales and Cost of Goods Sold. You could set up a report that gives all the detail for those accounts, rather than just the summary we used. That report could be used only by the departments directly impacted by these specifics. You may not want to make some detail available outside a certain circle of managers and investors.