Hello, I'm Mike Mitchell and today I'd like
to tell you how to figure a profit and loss
in a business. Profit and loss is pretty easy.
It's a basic economic concept in almost any
business. And really it's just a way to find
out how much money you're earning and how
much money you're spending. Basically profit
is your plus, and loss is your minus. Okay.
In most economic or financial software programs,
these profit and loss statements will be generated
automatically after you enter all of your
income and expenses for each month. For your
income, generally, this is all of the money;
using the US dollar sign just an example;
that comes in at any given month. This is
from receivables, maybe interest or any other
reason why you would have money coming in
from a company. For your expenses, this is
everything that you spend the money on throughout
the month. Some of the big ones would be maybe
rent or the salaries for your employees and
almost anything else that you can think of
that a business would have expenses for; postage,
insurance and basically whatever you have
to write a check for and the money that goes
out. Then, for your profit and loss statement
at the end, all of positive amounts will be
positive numbers and the negative amounts
will either have a minus or they sometimes
are denoted by having the number in parenthesis
and at the very end you'll have basically
your total at the bottom. And hopefully, if
you've done your business well, this will
be a profit and it will show the number in
a positive number. And at the end of each
month, you'll have a profit and loss statement.