Profit Loss Report Spreadsheet

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on October 15, 2009

Profit Loss Report Spreadsheet is an Excel spreadsheet that allows users to track small business expenses from month to month. It's nothing fancy, but it may be a good choice for users who, for whatever reason, don't want to use bookkeeping software.

The program's interface is simple, with a separate spreadsheet for each month, plus a report sheet and data sheet. Users add vendor names in the data spreadsheet, which are then available for selection in the other pages. Users then enter financial transactions much as they would in any other financial software, with the date, vendor, amount, and other information. The spreadsheets come with predefined categories for expenses, but users can customize these if needed. A separate Help page gives a description of the program's features but doesn't go into a lot of detail.

The program seems fairly intuitive, but it's hard to really try it out, as the trial version has almost all of the spreadsheet's cells set to read-only. Thus, we couldn't actually enter any transactions into the program to see how it worked. Overall, we liked the spreadsheet for its simplicity, but we also feel that it may be a little bit too simple, even for small business needs. Still, it's not a bad option for users who are used to saving receipts or recording transactions in a notebook.

Profit Loss Report Spreadsheet has no time limit on its trial period, but most of its functionality is disabled in the trial version. It comes as a ZIP file, but requires no installation. We recommend this program to users seeking a very basic way to record their business' financial transactions.