I’m not in finance and I’m sure there are different ways to go about this but just looking for a simple starting point to see profitability. I’m not looking for a perfect report but more of a gauge if we are more profitable this year than last and ballpark how much or how less profitable(10% more profitable). Are there any standard reports I can use or maybe a baq someone could share?
We are using Epicor 10.04
sales gross margin report…Financial Management–>Accounts Receivable–>Reports
@PaulMorgan is correct, the Sales Gross Margin report is the only out-of-the-box report that shows (if you’ll pardon the expression) GROSS margin. If you’re looking for any kind of NET PROFIT report, you’ll probably want either one of the more advanced Finance reporting modules (I don’t know what is available for your version), or someone with skills in BAQs and PowerBI.
Anyone have a net profit BAQ / dashboard they can share?
I’m comfortable with BAQs but not the financial tables… I googled the difference (I’m in IT not finance 
) and I see net profit is what I need…
Hi Eddie. You said that you were…
…but IMO, using advanced Finance reporting modules or a combination of BAQs and PowerBI is neither simple nor a starting point (unless you’re already quite familiar with the latter). Have you investigated using the standard out-of-the-box Financial Report Designer? It has built-in wizards to create basic financial statements, i.e. balance sheet and income statement. The key aspect to grasp is the assigment of categories to your GL accounts, so you may need to collaborate with your finance personnel on those.
Thanks Scott, profitability to me(a non-finance person) is the total money left after all bills are paid(e.g. payroll) relative to revenue that came in. Sorry that’s my misunderstanding for using the wrong terminology and not knowing this is an inherently complex problem.
Is solving this problem unique to every company(e.g. everyone sets up GL accounts differently so there is no standard solution)? I was hoping some GL accounts are for cost and some are for revenue and I could sum them all up for a given time period…
What you’re describing is known as “cash basis accounting”, more or less. Most companies have their financial statements based on “accrual basis accounting”, where the timing of the recognition of revenues and costs can be very different than the timing of the associated cash receipts and disbursements.
I think that solving this problem is indeed unique to every company, because companies have different approaches to setting up charts of accounts, in turn because they have different requirements (publicly traded vs. privately held, simple results reporting vs. actuals against budget, etc.). Yes, some GL accounts are for cost and some for revenue, and fundamentally, you do essentially sum them all up. However, depending on your requirements, the methodology for summing them is important, and that’s where the structure of the chart of accounts and the use of the COA categories come into play.
MORE INFO… if you want to extract more data from your system by creating your own BAQs and Dashboards, nearly all the data you need is held in the AR Invoice tables. the invoice detail records show the Cost of goods sold as well as the sale price, allowing you to get to the “profit”. This of course does not include the other non-manufacturing expenses (sales, commissions, etc), but it is typically what companies are looking for.
Thanks so much everyone for helping an IT guy start to get his head around accounting!
It’s fun haha