Divisional reporting in the Profit and Loss

To gain more insight and prepare a meaningful and comparable Profit and Loss report, Castaway allows you to group the sales and costs elements together instead of having a pile of numbers that just don’t cut it. With Castaway, you're also given the flexibility and control to design a Profit and Loss Chart of Accounts that is different from that of your accounting general ledger structure. 

There are a few ways for you to design your divisional reporting:

1. Group the sales and costs using Subtotals
2. Group the sales and costs using Sections
3. Create a separate Castaway file for each division/department/cost center and consolidate the individual forecasts to produce a single group report

Group the sales and costs using Subtotals

Using Castaway's Subtotals feature, you can group the sales and costs elements up to two levels in each Profit and Loss section in the Chart of Accounts. 

Click on the Sum icon to create a Subtotal.

Once a Subtotal has been created, you can rename the Subtotal by clicking into the header and then choose to either add new elements or drag and move existing elements to it. 

You're able to add subtotals in the following sections:

• Sales
• Direct Costs
• Overheads
• Other Income
• Other Expense
• Non-Operating Income
• Non Operating expense

TIP: You can multi-select several elements at once to move them together by either holding Shift or Ctrl on your keyboard and clicking on them. 

Note that using this option will only group the sales or costs together and will not automatically calculate the subtotal's Gross Profit. 

If your goal is to report each group's Profit Margin, the next option may be more suitable for you. 

Group the sales and costs using Sections

Castaway also gives you the flexibility to rearrange the Sections to report on separate Gross Profit and Gross Profit Margins for each division or trading department. You can add as many Sales, Direct Costs, and Overhead Sections as necessary to achieve this reporting. 

In Castaway, when one or more Direct Costs sections follows a Sales section, it will be interpreted as a Department, and Castaway will automatically create a Gross Profit and Gross Profit Margin reporting line in your Profit and Loss. 

To create a Section, go to the Forecast workspace, and depending on what type of Section you'd like to create, click on the green plus sign found under each Section in the Profit and Loss Chart of Accounts. 

TIP: You can move the Sections/ Elements up or down to place them exactly where you want by clicking and dragging them around. You can also insert a page break after each department reporting line in the Profit and Loss report to print each department separately. 

EXAMPLE: To illustrate this, see the screenshot below where we've reported our two departments - apples and oranges -using the Sections structure. They each now have their own Gross Profit reporting lines automatically reported for them. 

While you can add as many Sales and Direct Costs Sections as you like, Overhead sections are different as they can not be added to each individual department you set up. However, you're able to create different Overhead sections for each department set up and then add in your own reporting line to calculate the operating profit of the individual department. To learn more about adding your own reporting line to your reports, please refer to How to: Add Report Formulas to Castaway reports.

Create a separate Castaway file for each division/department/cost center and consolidate the individual forecasts to produce a single group report

Another alternative to Profit and Loss divisional reporting is to prepare a separate Castaway file for each division and Consolidate the forecast files via our Consolidation add-on. 

This option is ideal for users who have separate budget management systems for the different divisions and would like to analyze and report on them separately. 

If all the divisions share the same ledger account, you can choose to create a separate Head Office file to record other activities that do not fall within any of the divisions. 

When consolidating the forecast files, the order of divisions reported in the Consolidated Profit and Loss depends on the order of forecast files in your Setup workspace. 

Download sample files of all three setups down below: