Read your profit and loss

Open Reports → Profit and loss. It lists your income and expenses by category for the period you choose, with the same period last year or last month alongside for comparison, and a profit or loss total at the bottom.

Cash or accruals

The bar above the report lets you switch between two ways of counting the same transactions:

• Cash basis. As gov.uk puts it, "you only record income or expenses when you receive money or pay a bill". An invoice you've raised but not yet been paid for doesn't count yet; a bill you've received but not yet paid doesn't either.
• Accruals (traditional accounting). Income and expenses count by the date you invoiced or were billed, whether or not money has moved yet.

Cash is the default for sole traders and most landlords, and it's the basis your Self Assessment return uses; the profit and loss report on cash basis matches your tax estimate for the same tax year.

Disallowed expenses

Some costs (client entertainment is the usual one) are shown separately under Disallowed expenses. They're listed for completeness, so you can see where the money went, but they're left out of your tax figures because HMRC doesn't allow them as a deduction.

Comparing periods and filtering by property

The "Last period" column shows the equivalent period immediately before the one you're looking at, so a full tax year compares against the previous tax year, and a calendar month compares against the month before it.

If you're a landlord, a Property filter appears so you can see one property's income and expenses on their own, and a By property table breaks profit down per property for the period as a whole.

Following a figure back to its source

Every category name is a link. Click it to open the general ledger for that category, showing every invoice, bill, expense or bank transaction that makes up the total, each linking on to the document itself.