P&L Explained

If you’re running a small business (or you’re responsible for company or departmental accounts), or if you want to check out the financial reports filed by other public companies (maybe you’re a budding investor?), an understanding of profit and loss is essential. An effective project manager knows that as well as preparing a detailed budget, they also need to keep a record of their progress: if the project has its own P&L statement, managers can compare those figures to the predictions and tell whether the project is on track.

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What you will learn

A P&L statement (aka “income statement”) ultimately shows you whether a company is earning more money than it’s spending over a particular period. It’s one of 3 main financial statements used to analyse a company’s financial health, along with the balance sheet and cash flow statement. This course will show you how a P&L statement is prepared, and how understanding the principles this involves can be helpful when it comes to preparing future budgets.

About this course

So you’re in charge of a budget? Great, but how are you going to show that you’re sticking to it? You may need to report internally, inform stakeholders, or simply reassure yourself that everything is going to plan. You need a P&L statement! This document (or spreadsheet) shows the financial performance of a venture over a certain accounting period (usually a financial year, quarter, or month). Where a cash flow statement shows the actual cash inflows and outflows, the P&L statement shows whether the venture is profitable. That’s right. Profitability is not the same as cash in the bank. This course uncovers why that is, and much more.

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Engaging the learner

To be perfectly honest, we approach courses on weighty topics like financial management with the same trepidation that learners do. Some people are good with spreadsheets and numbers, others are more adept at creative pursuits like music, storytelling, and animation…

So how do you make financial concepts like profit and loss less intimidating? Well, we started with a scenario of an example company: Kleverkloggs Cereals. The CEO William Klever has kindly agreed to show us his P&L statement. Very kind of him, right? A nifty animation takes us through the statement line-by-line, but the backbone of this course is the document itself. We put a lot of work into designing a P&L statement that looks like the real deal – only more colourful, and simplified to make it more digestible!

We’re really pleased with how this course turned out, and we hope you’ll profit from it – get it?? The learning is supported by an infographic and provided along with a helpful jargon-buster.

Accessibility

Everyone has the right to learn and learner need can vary demanding on environment or disabilities. This course comes with transcripts so people have text options for an media, subtitles for all videos and is screen reader friendly with alternative text.

We take a number of steps to ensure visuals and navigation is easy for your people. For more information on the steps we take for accessibility check out how we make our courses.

How we make our courses

Our customers

Making workplace learning fun again

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You’ll have your own questions and challenges in your business, so we’d love to show you more and answer any questions. We’re excited to show you specific courses you’re interested in, or run you through more of our off the shelf eLearning courses.

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