The P&L calculator

The P&L Calculator is the backbone of every financial conversation you'll have — with investors, an accountant, or your co-founder. It's structured the way a real profit-and-loss statement is, so the numbers it produces are the ones people ask for.

How it's structured

Rows are line items; columns are months. There are three input sections, in the order they belong:

• Revenue — each distinct way you make money. Split lines that behave differently: a subscription line and a services line grow at different rates and are worth watching separately.
• Cost of goods sold — the direct cost of delivering what you sold. Hosting and payment processing for software; materials, manufacturing, and shipping for physical products; contractor pass-through for services. This sits above the gross profit line.
• Expenses — everything else, grouped into Payroll & People, Sales & Marketing, General & Admin, and Other. Each group gets its own subtotal, so you can see where the money actually goes instead of scanning twenty flat rows.

Change a row's group with the dropdown next to its name.

What gets calculated

• Gross revenue — all revenue lines.
• Total COGS — all direct costs.
• Gross profit and gross margin — revenue minus COGS, in dollars and as a percentage. After growth, gross margin is the number investors ask about first. Software businesses are typically expected above 70%; physical products run far lower, which is normal but changes what a fundable business looks like.
• Group subtotals and total operating expenses.
• Net profit and net margin — the bottom line.

The right-hand column totals each row across the window you're viewing.

Keeping the grid readable

A full P&L runs to forty rows or more, most of which you are not looking at right now. Four controls keep it manageable, and all four remember your choice:

• Click any section name — Revenue, Cost of goods sold, Expenses, or an expense group — to collapse it. Its totals stay on the header row, so a collapsed section still answers the question its rows were there to answer. Collapse all does the lot.
• Quarters folds twelve month columns into four. Twelve columns is what forces sideways scrolling, and for reviewing a year four is usually enough. Quarter cells are three months summed, so the view is read-only — switch back to 12 months to type.
• Compact tightens the rows and fits noticeably more on screen.
• The grid fills the window and scrolls on its own, with the month headers pinned to the top and NET PROFIT pinned to the bottom — the number you came for never leaves the screen.

Choosing the window

Two view modes sit above the grid:

• Calendar year — Jan through Dec of one year, which is what an accountant or tax filing wants. Year tabs switch between years, and + Year opens the next one.
• Rolling 12 months — the twelve months ending with the current one. If it's August, this is the window that actually reflects your business, and it's what most investors mean by "last twelve months" (LTM).

Line items are shared across all years, so a row you create once carries forward — and year-over-year comparison works without rebuilding anything.

Reading it six ways

The dropdown on the right changes what every cell shows:

• Actuals — what happened. The default.
• Plan — your budget. Editable, and stored separately from actuals, so setting a plan never touches your real figures.
• Variance — actual minus plan, per line and per month. Positive means above plan, which is good for revenue and bad for costs.
• % of revenue — every line as a share of revenue that month. The fastest way to spot a cost growing faster than the business.
• MoM growth — change from the previous month.
• YoY growth — change from the same month last year, which strips out seasonality.

Actuals and Plan are editable; the rest are derived and read-only. A banner tells you which one you're typing into, so you can't budget over your real numbers by accident.

Setting a plan is what lets you answer the question every board meeting opens with: did we hit it, and by how much?

Importing from a spreadsheet

Paste data takes a block copied straight out of Excel, Numbers, or Google Sheets — one row per line item, the name first, then one column per month.

Rows are matched to your existing line items by name (case-insensitive); anything unrecognised is added as a new row. You pick which section it lands in, and a preview tells you how many rows will be updated and how many created before anything is written.

Currency symbols, thousands separators, and accounting parentheses are all handled — ($1,200) reads as −1200. A header row is ignored. Blank cells and zeros clear that month.

Entering numbers

Click any cell and type. Shorthand works everywhere: 50k becomes 50,000 and 1.2m becomes 1,200,000.

Rename a line item by clicking its name. Removing a row asks you to confirm, since it deletes every month recorded against it across all years. Clearing a year (the bin icon on a year tab) erases that year's figures but keeps your line items and other years intact.

Everything saves automatically — the header shows "Saving…" then "Saved".

Exporting

Export CSV gives you Section, Category, Line item, one column per visible month, and every computed row including both margins. Once you've set a plan, it also carries plan and variance rows. That's the format an accountant or board member expects, and it opens cleanly in Excel, Numbers, and Google Sheets. The filename records which window you exported.

Making it useful

• Use real numbers, not targets. Keep projections in the SaaS Financial Model; the P&L should reflect what actually happened.
• Update it monthly. Touched once, it's a document. Touched every month, it's a signal — you'll spot a cost creeping up long before it becomes a problem.
• Get COGS right. It's the difference between knowing your gross margin and guessing it, and it feeds the true contribution figures in Marketing Contribution.

Once your expenses are in, the Burn Rate & Runway calculator turns them into the number investors ask about first.

If you used this tool before August 2026

Your data was moved to the new structure automatically. Rows are preserved with all their monthly figures, and your bottom line is unchanged. Two things were rearranged: any row named like "Cost of Goods Sold" moved into the new COGS section, and each expense row was assigned a best-guess group. Both are worth a quick check — the group dropdown fixes anything that landed in the wrong place.