Business P&L Tracker — Methodology Handbook

The Business P&L Tracker is the income statement of a small business, kept live. You log three kinds of lines — income, cost of goods, operating expenses — and the tracker builds the P&L cascade (revenue → gross profit → operating profit → net profit) for any period, compares it with the period before, shows where the money comes from (channels, products, customers) and where it goes (categories), keeps sales tax outside the numbers that are yours, and measures the year against the goals you set.

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It is one tracker for every kind of small business. A freelancer, an Etsy shop, an agency, a creator and a café all read the same cascade; the business type you pick only decides which categories are offered first and whether products and channels are part of the story. The maths never changes.

Who it is for

Solo professionals and freelancers who invoice clients and want to know what is left after software, ads and fees.
E-commerce sellers on Etsy, Shopify, Amazon or their own store, who need revenue by channel and product, platform fees, postage and packaging as cost of goods, and a real margin.
Small agencies and studios with contractors and retainers.
Creators earning from platforms, sponsors, subscriptions and digital products.
Small retail and production — a shop, a workshop, a café — buying or making stock and selling it.

If you have outgrown a notebook but do not need full double-entry accounting, this is the layer in between.

The three kinds of line

Every transaction has a kind. It decides which step of the cascade the amount lands on.

Income — money the business received: a sale, a marketplace payout, a paid invoice, a sponsorship, ad revenue. Refunds are logged as income with the Refunds category and are subtracted from revenue.
Cost of goods (COGS) — what it cost to deliver the thing you sold: stock and materials, platform and payment-processing fees, postage and packaging, contractors who did the delivered work, manufacturing.
Expense — the cost of running the business regardless of any single sale: advertising, software, rent, utilities, payroll, insurance, equipment, professional services, travel, office supplies, bank fees, education, business taxes and licences.

The distinction between cost of goods and expense is the whole point of the cascade: it separates whether the product makes money (gross margin) from whether the business makes money (operating margin).

Each line also carries a category (a built-in one for its kind, or one you create), an optional channel (where the money came through), an optional product (what was sold or bought, with a quantity), a counterparty (the customer or the vendor), a currency, a date, a separate tax amount, and — on a sale — the fees kept by the marketplace or card processor before paying out. A line can also be set to repeat weekly, monthly or yearly (see Recurring lines).

The add form, field by field

Kind (required) — Income, Cost of goods or Expense; it decides which step of the cascade the amount lands on.
Amount (required) — the net figure, before tax, in the line's own currency.
Sales tax / VAT — the tax on top: collected from the customer on income, paid to a supplier on a cost. Pre-filled from the rate in Setup.
Fees kept (income only) — what the marketplace or card processor kept before paying out. Pre-filled from the channel's fee %.
Category (required; one is always selected) — a built-in for the kind, or your own via New category.
Channel, Product and Quantity — where the money came through and what was sold; picking a product fills the amount from quantity × unit price.
Customer / vendor — who paid or was paid; the Customers view is built from it. The field remembers what you have entered before: on focus it offers the names you use most (and the directory's entries), typing narrows the list, and picking a name brings its usual side, category and last description along. A known brand shows its own logo the moment its name is typed (Etsy, DeepL, MediaFire, OpenAI — one Latin word is tried as that company's .com); a website address typed instead of a name (mediafire.com) pins the logo exactly. The Description field offers your previous descriptions the same way. Date (required) — when the money moved.
Repeats — once, weekly, monthly or yearly.
Description and Notes — free text; the description is what the list and the calendar show.

The AI business coach can fill the form for you: tell it "log the Etsy payout of $412 from yesterday" or "add $250 rent on the 1st, monthly" and the add form opens with the line typed in for you to check and save — it never saves on its own.

The cascade — how every number is computed

All figures below are computed for the period you are looking at, from the transactions dated inside it.

Gross revenue = the sum of income lines, excluding the Refunds category.

Refunds = the sum of income lines in the Refunds category.

Net revenue = gross revenue − refunds. Every margin below is a share of net revenue.

Fees = the sum of the fees kept on sale lines — what Etsy, Shopify Payments, Stripe or PayPal deducted before the payout reached you. Booked on the sale rather than as a separate cost line, so a product's margin already knows about them. (A fee can equally be entered as a cost-of-goods line under Platform fees; both ways land on the same step of the cascade.)

Cost of goods sold = the sum of cost-of-goods lines.

Gross profit = net revenue − fees − cost of goods sold. Gross margin = gross profit ÷ net revenue × 100. A product-level number: what is left of each sale after delivering it.

Operating expenses = the sum of expense lines.

Operating profit = gross profit − operating expenses. This is the business's profit before income tax — the headline on the dashboard. Operating margin = operating profit ÷ net revenue × 100.

Income-tax reserve = operating profit × the income-tax reserve percentage from Setup, when profit is positive (zero when it is not).

What you keep = operating profit − income-tax reserve.

Margins are shown as a dash when there is no revenue in the period, rather than as a meaningless 0% or a division by zero.

Sales tax and VAT sit outside the cascade

Every line has a separate tax amount — the sales tax, VAT or GST on top of the net amount. On income it is tax you collected from the customer; on cost-of-goods and expense lines it is tax you paid a supplier.

Sales tax collected = the sum of tax amounts on income lines.
Sales tax paid = the sum of tax amounts on cost-of-goods and expense lines.
Owed to the tax office = collected − paid.

None of these touch revenue, cost or profit. The tax you collect was never the business's money, and adding it to revenue is the most common way a spreadsheet overstates a small business's income. When a sales tax rate is set in Setup, the form pre-fills the tax field on every income line at that rate; you can always overwrite it.

Periods and comparison

The dashboard, the report and the transactions list each remember their own period: this month, last month, this quarter, year to date (from the fiscal-year start month in Setup), this year, last year, the last twelve months, all time, or a custom range.

Wherever a previous period makes sense, the tracker compares against the same-length window immediately before: a month against the month before, a quarter against the previous quarter, a custom fortnight against the fortnight before it. Whole calendar months compare against whole calendar months. The percentage change is (this − previous) ÷ |previous| × 100, and is shown as a dash when the previous period has nothing to compare against.

The report notes when the period you are looking at is still running, because a half-month next to a full one is not a fair comparison.

What "previous period" means for year to date. Year to date is not a whole number of months, so its previous period is the same number of days ending the day before the year started — on 20 September that is 13 April to 31 December of the previous year, not January to September. That is why the comparison control on the Analytics tab names the dates it resolved to (vs 13 Apr – 31 Dec 2025) rather than the rule: what you are comparing against is never a guess. To compare January–September with January–September of last year, choose same period last year; to compare with any window of your own — a launch month, last year's Black Friday week — choose custom range in the period menu — the presets sit down the left and a calendar on the right (start and end, two months side by side, month and year pickable from a list), so a preset can be checked against its dates before Apply, and any click on the calendar becomes a custom range. Comparison is off by default; the comparison menu offers the previous period, the same period last year, a custom range (the same calendar) or none. Every trend chart carries a bucket switch — week, month, quarter — in its corner; the chart opens at the bucket that fits the window (weeks for a quarter, months for a year or two, quarters beyond) and the switch overrides it, so "all time" can be read by month. On a chart, the compared line is aligned bucket by bucket (the fourth week of this window against the fourth week of that one), and the tooltip titles the compared column with that bucket's own dates.

Analytics — seven views of the same books

The Analytics tab is one set of filters over seven views. The filters narrow the lines (channel, category, product, customer — each a list of ticks, so two channels or three categories can be read together; an empty list means all) and the window (period, and what to compare it with: the previous same-length period, the same period a year earlier, a custom range of your own, or nothing — the control shows the dates the comparison resolved to); every view then runs the same arithmetic over the same lines, so a donut on one view and a trend on another cannot disagree. Clicking a slice, a bar or a name adds it to the filter (and clicking again removes it); the chips under the filter bar show each chosen value and remove it with one tap. The Transactions tab's channel and category filters are the same lists of ticks. Filters are remembered between visits.

Overview — the cascade for the window (net revenue, gross profit and margin, operating expenses, operating profit and margin, average sale, total costs, what you keep) with the change against the compared window; revenue, costs and profit over time as areas with the compared window's revenue as a dashed line; the rule-based insights (an operating margin that moved by three points or more, an expense category growing faster than revenue, a customer bringing half or more of revenue, a gross margin under 30% or over 60%, the best month, sales tax owed); the year's goals as rings — revenue, profit and the monthly spending limit from Setup, each with ahead/behind pace and the run-rate; and where the money comes from and goes, ranked.
Trends — the same cascade along the time axis, by week, month or quarter (chosen automatically from the window's length, or by hand). Where each unit of revenue went as 100%-stacked bars (profit, fees, cost of goods, operating expenses). The operating-margin line, with the compared window's margin dashed. Plan vs actual for the goal year: each month's revenue and profit against one twelfth of the annual goal. This year vs last year by calendar month. Cumulative profit since the first of January.
Structure — the waterfall from revenue through fees, cost of goods, gross profit, operating expenses and the tax reserve to what you keep: every bar carries its figure and its share of revenue, and one line under the chart says what a hundred of revenue turns into. The names under any chart are switches — click Cost of goods once and that step leaves the cascade (a seller of digital goods has none); the choice is remembered on this device. Donuts of revenue by channel and by category, of costs by category (fees, cost of goods and expenses together) and of fees by channel. The advertising return: ad spend in the window, ROAS (revenue ÷ ad spend), ads as a share of revenue. Tables of every revenue and cost line with its share of revenue and its change against the compared window.
Products (shops and product businesses) — revenue, units and profit per product. Profit is the product's revenue minus the fees kept on its sales minus its cost of goods: the cost-of-goods lines tagged with the product when there are any, otherwise units sold × the catalogue's unit cost, and the view says which. Best seller and most profitable are often different rows, which is the point. Products not sold in the window, with their last sale. A products-by-period table, tinted by amount.
Structure also carries an "Over time, by…" card: one slice of the books across the window, stacked bucket by bucket — costs or revenue, by category, channel or counterparty (top six coloured, the rest as "other"), with a table of total, number of lines and last date. It follows every filter on the tab, so category = payroll plus "Payee" is the "how much I paid to whom, and when" chart, and revenue by channel over time shows which channel grew. Lines with an empty counterparty are one "no payee" row; refunds are a negative line on the revenue side.
Customers (services, agencies, creators and general businesses) — read from the customer field on sale lines: top customers, revenue per customer, new vs returning (a customer is new when their first-ever sale falls inside the window), the share carried by the top three names (a warning above half), repeat customers gone quiet, and a customers-by-period table. Sale lines without a customer are counted and reported as such.
Taxes — one fiscal year at a time (fiscal years follow the start month in Setup). Sales tax collected, paid and to remit; the income-tax reserve as the reserve percentage of each profitable quarter; the four quarters with their revenue, profit, sales tax, reserve and due date (from the estimated-tax reminder in Setup), marked running, closed or past due; sales tax by month; and every deductible category totalled for the year. Export tax year downloads all of it as one CSV for an accountant. It is arithmetic on your own rates, not tax advice.
Forecast — a run-rate projection: the average of your last 3, 6 or 12 full months, compounded month by month by the revenue growth and cost growth you set with two sliders. The next 12 months as a chart; five years as a table (the current year is actual months so far plus the projected rest); five scenarios around your growth assumption; and a runway — how many months the cash you enter lasts at the projected burn — when months run at a loss. Nothing is fitted or predicted; it is "if the next year looks like the last few months, plus X%".

Calendar

The Calendar tab draws the month as a grid, each day carrying its sale and cost lines, the day's net, the recurring lines projected ahead of their date, the estimated-tax deadlines (one per fiscal quarter, from the reminder setting), the goal year's last day, and your own events — a supplier call, a payout day, a market — with an optional time and amount. An event with an amount can be recorded on the books with one tap, prefilling the form for you to confirm. Beside the grid, the picked day lists everything on it with an add on this day button; with no day picked it lists what is coming up. Inside shared books the events belong to the books, written and seen by every member; in personal books they are yours.

Recurring lines

Rent, payroll, a software plan, a monthly retainer: set Repeats on the line when you add it (weekly, monthly or yearly) and the next occurrence is created by itself when its date arrives — always on the same day of the month, clamped to the last day of a shorter month, so a rent dated the 31st never drifts. If the charge day changes — you move the latest line from the 1st to the 7th — the series follows the new day from then on. An occurrence is filed under the same account as the line before it. A line is never created ahead of its date, and a line you date in the future stays off the transactions list, the totals and the analytics until its day comes (the calendar and the series list show it meanwhile). Every series is listed in Setup → Recurring lines with what it brings or costs per month and its next date; a series can be stopped (the rows already on the books stay) or deleted whole. Inside a shared book, a series is created by its author: the occurrences appear, under the author's name, whenever the author opens the book — nobody's rows are ever written by somebody else.

Accounts — where the money is

The P&L says whether the business made money; the Accounts tab says where the money is right now. An account is any place the business keeps money:

a bank account or a savings / deposit account;
cash, or the till of a shop — a chain gives every shop its own till;
a payment processor (Stripe, Square, PayPal, a card terminal's acquirer) or a marketplace balance (Etsy, Amazon) — money waiting to be paid out;
an e-wallet (Wise, Payoneer…);
a business credit card or a credit line / overdraft — whose balance is money owed, not money held.

Each account has a currency, a balance as of a date (lines dated earlier are already inside that figure and are not counted again — so a business that starts mid-year types today's bank balance and nothing is double-counted), optionally the channel it belongs to (a shop, a marketplace) and, for credit, a limit. One account can be the default.

How a line moves money. A line's amount is net of tax, so on its account a sale brings in net + tax collected − the fee the platform kept; a refund takes out net + tax given back; a cost takes out net + tax paid. Every line picks its account in the form; it is pre-filled from the line's channel (a sale in shop #2 lands on shop #2's till, a sale on Etsy on the Etsy balance), else the default account. Imports and booked invoices are filed the same way, and a file's Account column is matched by name. Old lines can be filed in bulk: select them in Transactions and choose Account….

Money that moves without being income or a cost is recorded as a money move, and never reaches the P&L:

Transfer between two accounts — Etsy pays out to the bank, the till is banked, the card is paid off. Between currencies, both amounts are recorded. A transfer can carry a fee; the fee is booked as a bank fees expense line on the source account, so the P&L counts it.
Owner put in / owner took out — your own money into the business, or an owner's draw. It changes the balance; it is neither revenue nor an expense.
Loan received / loan repaid — the principal. Interest is a cost: book it as an expense line.
Reconcile — type what the bank, the terminal or the till really shows; the difference is recorded so the account matches. Use it after counting cash or reading a bank statement.

Every place money leaves an account offers All, which fills in the whole balance.

The tab shows the money held across all accounts, the money owed on credit and the net of the two, how many lines still have no account, and a card per account coloured by how it stands — violet at zero, green with money on it, red below zero — with its last movement and, for credit, what is still available. Shops with several accounts (a till and a terminal) are grouped under the shop. A card opens that account's lines. A closed account is archived: it leaves the pickers and keeps its history. The forecast's runway uses the money held on your accounts unless you type another figure.

Balances are never stored: they are worked out from the lines and moves every time, so editing a line moves its account's balance at once.

Goals and the run-rate

In Setup you can set an annual revenue goal and a profit goal for a given year. For that year the tracker computes:

Actual — revenue and operating profit year to date.
Pace = goal × months elapsed ÷ 12 — where the actual should be today to land exactly on the goal. The dashboard says whether you are ahead of or behind pace, and by how much.
Run-rate = actual ÷ months elapsed × 12 — where the year lands if the average month so far repeats.

A monthly spending limit works the same way for operating expenses: the Overview ring shows the window's operating expenses against the limit scaled to the window's length — one month against one limit, a quarter against three, a custom range against its months; "all time" measures the books from the first transaction to the last. Setup shows last full month against it.

Goals and the limit are stored in the reporting currency and shown in whichever currency you are viewing.

Which years the goal can be set for. The year picker in Setup is not a fixed list: it always offers the two years before the current one (a late book being written up), the current year, and the five after it (a plan written early), plus whatever year is already saved. It moves with the calendar by itself — in 2031 it offers 2029 to 2036 — so there is nothing to update and no year "runs out". One goal pair is kept at a time, for the year chosen; switching the year keeps the amounts, so a plan for next year is typed by picking the year and changing the figures.

Channels, products and categories

Channels are where the money comes through — Etsy, a Shopify store, weekend markets, a retainer client. A channel can carry a platform fee percentage, which pre-fills the fees kept field on income lines through that channel. A channel shows its real logo when it is a known marketplace or platform (Etsy, Shopify, Amazon, eBay, Creative Fabrica, Gumroad, Patreon, Upwork and some sixty more are recognised by name) or when you type the shop's website in the channel form — any domain works, so your own store shows its own mark. Picking a glyph from the icon grid switches the logo off again.

Products are what you sell — a product or a service line — with an optional SKU, a unit price and a unit cost. A product is not tied to a channel: the same candle can sell on Etsy, in the Shopify store and at a market, and each sale line carries both the channel it came through and the product it was. That is what makes revenue by channel and revenue by product two different views of the same lines. From price and cost the tracker shows a unit margin = (price − cost) ÷ price × 100, and the report lists each product's revenue in the period beside it. Choosing a product on a new line fills the amount from quantity × unit price (income) or quantity × unit cost (cost of goods) when the amount is still empty.

Products are optional. A P&L needs only the lines; add products when you want unit margins, per-product profit in Analytics or a product filter. You do not have to type them: Import CSV in Setup → Products takes a Shopify Export products file (each variant becomes its own product, named "Title — Variant"; image-only rows are skipped; SKU, price and cost per item are read), an Etsy listings CSV, or any sheet with a name column and optional SKU / price / cost columns. Columns are guessed from the headers and can be corrected before the import; rows already on the list, by name or SKU, are left alone, so the same file can be imported again after the catalogue grew. A transactions CSV creates products by name too, so a sales export brings its products with it.

Categories come built in for each kind and are enough for most businesses. You can add your own for any side of the ledger, each with an icon of its own — or a logo, by typing the service's website. A category you name is shown exactly as you typed it. Built-ins this business never uses can be hidden from the form (Setup → Categories, the eye icon); a hidden category leaves the form only — lines that already carry it stay exactly as they were, and it can be shown again at any time.

Vendors & people are who the money goes to or comes from: a platform you pay every month (OpenAI, Zapier), a supplier, someone on the team ("Dasha — designer, banners and listings"), a regular client. Each entry carries its usual side of the ledger and category, a one-line note on who they are and what for, and a logo (recognised by name or by website). On a line, typing in the supplier / recipient field offers them; picking one fills the side and the category, and the row in the list wears the vendor's mark. A line with no recognised counterparty wears its channel's logo instead (a sale on Stuvia shows Stuvia), and only then the category's glyph. A real logo fills the whole tile; the glyphs keep their tinted square. Setup lists them grouped by category with what each one cost in the last twelve months — which is how "what do I pay for subscriptions, and to whom" is answered without a report.

A channel's fee has two parts, because that is how marketplaces charge: a percentage of the order (Etsy's 6.5% transaction fee plus 3% payment processing = 9.5%) and a fixed amount per sale (Etsy's $0.25 processing plus $0.20 listing renewal = $0.45; Shopify Payments 2.9% + $0.30). Known marketplaces fill both in when you type their name; the form then pre-fills fees kept on a sale as amount × percent + fixed, and you can always overwrite it.

Removing a channel, product or category never changes a transaction's amount — the line just loses the link.

Every list in Setup — channels, products, vendors & people, and the recurring lines — can be dragged into the order you want (the grip at the left of a row). The order is yours, not the tracker's: it holds across the form's pickers, the filters and reloads, and the rest sorts as before.

How much to fill in — three ways to keep the books

The add form has many fields because the tracker serves many kinds of business. No business needs all of them. The only fields a line needs are its kind, its amount, a category and a date; every other field is optional, and a report simply skips what it cannot see — it never breaks and never invents.

A marketplace or digital-goods seller (Etsy, Creative Fabrica, Gumroad, an own Shopify store; hundreds of listings whose prices and discounts change every week) keeps the books at the level of the channel, not the product:

One income line per channel per month, or per payout — "Etsy, September, $2,140". The channel is set; the category is Product sales (not Other income: the Structure view and the coach read Other income as irregular, one-off money, not the core business).
Fees kept is worth filling when known: gross sales on the line plus the platform's cut in fees kept gives the real margin per channel and puts the fees where they belong, in cost of goods. Entering only the net payout is fine too — the numbers stay right, the fees just stay invisible.
Customer / payer stays empty. Buyers on a marketplace are anonymous and numerous; the field is for a named buyer. Do not put the marketplace's name there — the marketplace is the channel, and a "customer" called Etsy carrying 100% of revenue would trip the concentration warning for nothing.
Product and quantity stay empty. A catalogue is for businesses with a handful of units and a unit cost that matters.
Ads, software, subscriptions go in as expenses — a monthly recurring line each, once.

What such books give: revenue by channel, profit per channel once its fees and ads are attached to the channel, the cascade and margins, goals and run-rate, the tax view, the forecast. What they do not give: per-product profit and the product filter (no products), and a Customers view with nothing in it — it will say that all revenue has no customer on the line, which is a statement of how the books are kept, not an error.

A services business, an agency, a freelancer fills the customer on every sale: that is where new vs returning, the top-three share and "gone quiet" come from, and paid invoices from the Invoices Tracker book themselves with the customer already on them. Products are optional here too — a "service line" product is useful only to compare offerings.

A shop, a workshop, a maker with physical goods fills products with a unit cost: that is what unit margins, per-product profit after fees, and the product filter are built from; stock purchases are cost-of-goods lines.

Common "am I doing this right" questions:

Do I have to add every product? No. Add products only when you want per-product numbers; a marketplace seller with hundreds of listings never does.
Is one line a month per channel enough? Yes. Charts then have one point per month per channel; view them by month, not by week or day.
Gross sales or net payout? Either, kept consistent. Gross + fees kept shows the platform's cut; net alone hides it.
Which category for a payout from a marketplace? Product sales (or Subscriptions, Licensing, Commissions if that is what the platform pays for).
What goes in Customer for a marketplace sale? Nothing. The marketplace is the channel.
A refund? An income line with the Refunds category and the refunded amount; it comes off revenue.
Tax on a marketplace sale? If the marketplace collects and remits sales tax or VAT itself (Etsy and most app stores do), leave the tax field empty — that tax was never yours to hold.

Getting lines onto the books

By hand — the add form, which opens on the kind, pre-orders categories for your business type, pre-fills tax at your sales-tax rate and, when a product is picked, the amount.
Scan a document — photograph a receipt, a supplier invoice or a marketplace payout screenshot; the tracker reads the kind, counterparty, net amount, tax, currency, date and a best-fit category and opens the form with them filled in for you to check. Nothing is saved until you press save. The picture itself is kept with the line: a paperclip on the row opens it, the add/edit form shows it (and lets you attach or replace a photo by hand), and every image you uploaded is listed under Files in the library, with a link back to the line — including lines booked into a shared book, where every member of the book can open the picture from the row.
Import a CSV — an Etsy, Shopify, Stripe, PayPal or bank export. The columns are matched to fields from the headers (you confirm the mapping), the rows become lines, and channels or products named in the file are created if they do not exist yet. Rows without a usable amount are skipped and counted.
Book paid invoices — invoices marked paid in the Invoices Tracker are offered as revenue lines with the customer, date, net amount and tax already filled in. Each invoice can be booked once.
Hand a line to the Expenses Tracker — any line can be sent to the personal Expenses ledger; it prefills the form there for you to confirm, it never writes behind your back.

Calculators beside the books

The header's calculator button opens the business calculators that answer the questions a P&L raises — break-even, e-commerce profit per order, CAC and LTV, self-employment tax, sales tax, a freelance rate. Each product in Setup has its own analysis button that opens the e-commerce profit and break-even calculators with that product's price and cost, the busiest channel's fee and last month's operating expenses already typed in. The calculators only read; nothing is written back to the books. On the business calculators' own pages, the "beyond the calculator" card points back here.

Currencies

Each line is stored in its own currency. Aggregates — the dashboard, the report, the goals — are converted into the currency you are viewing in at today's rates, and say so when the underlying lines are mixed. The transactions list shows each line in the currency it was recorded in. Goals typed in the viewing currency are converted into the reporting currency for storage.

Sample business

A new account opens on an example business — a handmade-candle shop selling on Etsy, its own store and weekend markets, with eight months of books — so every feature is visible before you have data of your own. The example disappears by itself the moment you add your first line, import a file or book an invoice; the Clear sample button removes it earlier.

Export

Every transaction, with every field the form collects (fees, repetition and account included), plus the P&L cascade for the period on screen, downloads as a CSV — on every plan, always. The Taxes view exports the fiscal year — deductible categories, quarters, sales tax and reserve — as a second CSV.

Free and Pro

The free plan keeps a limited number of transactions and everything built on them: the report, the margins, channels and products, goals, CSV import and export, booking invoices. Pro removes the transaction limit and adds document scanning, the AI business coach and shared books. Transactions already recorded never disappear when a plan ends; only adding new ones is limited.

The AI business coach

With Pro, a coach can answer questions about your books — why the margin moved, which expense to cut first, whether you are on pace for a goal, how much to set aside for tax. It reads the same numbers this handbook describes, computed the same way, and never invents a figure that is not in your data. It offers general business-finance guidance, not accounting or tax advice; for filing, deductions and anything jurisdiction-specific it will point you to a qualified accountant.

Shared books

The books can be kept with someone else — a business partner, an accountant. Inside shared books:

Editors add and change lines, channels, products, categories, accounts and money moves. Administrators also set the business settings (type, currency, tax rules, goals) and invite people. A viewer sees everything, can export everything, and changes nothing.
Everybody pays for themselves: editing requires the editor's own active Pro; a lapsed subscription turns them into a viewer without hiding a single line from anyone.
Every line records who added it, and shared lists show it.
Your personal books stay private and are never mixed into shared totals, and shared books never count against your personal free limit.
What does not happen automatically: nothing is copied between personal and shared books; a member who leaves keeps nothing, but the lines they added stay.

What the tracker does not do

It is not double-entry accounting: there are no balance sheets, no accounts receivable or payable, no depreciation schedules. Accounts show where cash sits; they are not a chart of accounts.
It does not connect to a bank: balances come from the lines and moves you record; reconcile when the bank says otherwise.
It does not file taxes or compute income tax; the reserve is a percentage you choose.
It does not track stock levels. Inventory purchases are cost-of-goods lines; a separate stock count is not kept.
A platform fee on a channel is a hint: it pre-fills the fees kept field on a sale through that channel, and you can always overwrite it.
The forecast is a run-rate on your assumptions, not a prediction; the tax view is your own rates applied to your own books, not a filing.

The workspace board and the weekly email

On the signed-in home (the workspace board) the tracker is a tile: this month's operating profit with its margin, revenue against costs, and the last months of profit as a line once there are three of them; the panel behind it lists revenue, costs, margin, sales tax to remit and the top channel. The tile reads your own books only — the example business never appears on the board, so it stays empty until your first line — and it converts into the currency the header shows.

The weekly digest email (Pro) carries one line for the business — revenue, costs, operating profit and margin this month, the change in profit against last month, sales tax to remit and the top channel — and can make the week's next step about it: books quiet for ten days, a tax date inside three weeks, or last month's operating expenses over your limit.

The tracker keeps the books; these answer the questions the books raise.

Break-even calculator — how many units or how much revenue before the fixed costs are covered; opened from any product in Setup with its price, cost and last month's expenses already typed in.
E-commerce profit calculator — profit per order after platform fees, payment processing, shipping and ads.
CAC & LTV calculator — whether what a customer costs to win is paid back by what they bring.
Self-employment tax calculator — what to set aside from operating profit; its result can become the tracker's income-tax reserve.
Sales tax calculator — the tax on top of a price, for a sale or a supplier invoice.
Freelance rate calculator — the hourly or day rate that turns a revenue goal into a schedule.
Invoices Tracker — paid invoices are booked as revenue in one click, each invoice once.
Expenses Tracker — personal money; a business line can be handed to it with amount and tax intact.
Net Worth Tracker — where the business's retained profit meets everything else you own.

More trackers at calculatorai.app/trackers.