Navigating your rollercoaster looking financial statements and how to fix it

Do you ever open your financial statements and think, "these look like a rollercoaster?" There are significant losses one month and profits the next. Are you frustrated because when you look at your Profit & Loss report it makes NO SENSE in what is happening in the business?

There's a very good reason for this and it's not your analytical skills. In the contracting world, it's likely that materials deposits may be billed to the client in one month but invoiced to you from the supplier the next. The same may be true of your subcontractor expenses. The subcontractor asks for a retainer, but the revenue and billing aren't perfectly matched in the same month. This can scare a lot of people to try to follow the flow month-over-month.

Oftentimes, draw schedules are heavily front-loaded with deposits, you are drawing ahead for costs and deposits that are not yet incurred. This is great until the job nears completion when you've already collected the money, but still have to pay all of the costs to finish the job. During the earlier months of the job, you are often over-billed, and near the end, you are under-billed. This can be extrapolated with multiple jobs going on at once causing complete chaos on your profit and loss report month after month.

The good news, there is a fix. Work-in-process or Percentage of Completion to the rescue! In order to get to the fix, we need to make sure a few pieces of data are being tracked within the accounting system. If you don't enter these pieces of data into your system, you can still plug them into your spreadsheet calculator.

Data required to create a detailed WIP:

• Estimated Costs of the Project
• Actual Costs of the Project
• Estimated Revenue of the Project (Contract Value)
• Actual Revenue of the Project
• Total Revenues Earned - Prior Year
• Cost of Revenue - Prior Year

The key to this rollercoaster fix is to match the revenue invoiced during a certain period of time with the costs incurred during that period. Each month, a WIP calculator will allow the accounting team to record the over/under billing journal entries to align the revenues and costs. The following month, the journal entry will be reversed and the same exercise will be started again.

I know what you are thinking, "You lost me at journal entry." I understand this is a lot to take in, particularly if you are a DIY'er. It is, however, what you must do if you ever want to see a Profit & Loss report that truly represents what is happening in your business. It's really the only way to know whether or not you are actually profitable.

There is a lot of leg work that must be done before getting to the starting line of creating a WIP report. If you are a DIY'er or have a long-term bookkeeper that wants to learn more about getting the company off the rollercoaster, let's chat about getting a system set up so that you can start to see better financial statements.

Landau Consulting Solutions provides outsourced CFO services and business advisory services. Schedule a time to chat about accounting services for your company: https://calendly.com/landauconsulting