In the Settings sheet, please follow the steps outlined below.


Step 1: Enter Company Name


Step 2: Enter start date


A screenshot of a social media post Description automatically generated


Step 3: Enter all your Accounts with starting Balances


Each account is given a name. There are three types of accounts.

  1. Bank accounts such as Savings or Checking. This represents money that is held in bank.
  2. Credit Card accounts
  3. Cash accounts – These could be cash in your wallet, cash in a cashier box in your company, etc. Essentially each place where business’ money is held as cash with you.

When entering starting balance, please enter a negative value if you owe money. For example, in Credit Card accounts, you typically owe money to the credit card company if you have a balance. Enter that amount as negative value. If I have $500 balance on my Credit card, I owe $500 to Credit card company. So, I will enter -$500 as Starting Balance.


Step 4: Enter Sub-Categories of Transactions

In order to create the automated Profit & Loss statement (or income statement) for your business, it is important to categorize your financial transactions into proper categories.

The template provides 5 categories:

  1. Income: All sales transactions
  2. Cost of Sales: Expenses that are required to make the sales. This will typically include raw material purchase and labor expenses needed to create the products that are sold.
  3. Operating Expense: All expenses that are related to operating the business such as administrative, marketing, advertising, and general costs
  4. Transfer: This category is for transfer of funds within your account. Examples of these are transferring money from your checking account to pay for your credit card balance, withdrawing your money at ATM from checking account and transferring money from your savings account to your checking account.
  5. Other: This is to capture other expense or income. Typical example will be income tax payments made.

These 5 categories are fixed and cannot be modified.


However, within each category, you can create your own sub categories for tracking.


In the above screenshot, I have created 20 sub-categories across the 5 categories. You can enter up to 33 sub-categories.

That ends our set-up. This is only needed when you begin using the template.


Next, please see the article on how to enter transactions in the template.