Daily P&L

A daily P&L is a profit and loss statement computed per calendar day: every order, refund, cost and a daily slice of overhead booked to the day it belongs to. It answers how much profit the store made today, rather than how the month looked once it was over.

What separates it from a monthly report cut into thirty pieces is recognition: each amount lands on its own day, in the store's own timezone, so a day is a complete little statement rather than a fraction of a big one. Refunds land on their refund day, ad spend on its spend day, and fixed costs arrive as slices instead of as one catastrophic Tuesday.

The reason to run one is speed of correction. A month-end report tells you a pricing mistake existed; a daily P&L shows it the morning after it started, while the promotion can still be stopped. On the demo store behind these pages, 20 August closed at €40.607,66 of gross revenue and €8.362,56 of EBITDA, and every column between the two is a cost that was booked to that day on purpose.

The trade-off is honesty about noise. Single days swing with weekday, weather and one big order, so a daily statement needs its context: yesterday against the same weekday, the month so far against its fixed costs, never one bar alone.

The daily P&L tracker is this idea as a free spreadsheet, one row per day in the same column order nouz computes; the product exists for the month the spreadsheet stops being fun to fill in.