The free weekly P&L template.

Weekly is the honest floor, not a compromise

Not every business suits a nightly number. A quiet studio, a workshop, a service business with a handful of larger jobs — for these, daily P&L is noise, because a single day tells you almost nothing. But monthly is genuinely too slow: by the time a month closes and reconciles, a bad patch has run for five or six weeks unchallenged.

Weekly is the sweet spot for a lot of small businesses. A week is long enough to smooth out a dead Tuesday and a bumper Saturday into a real signal, and short enough that you catch a downturn while there’s still a quarter left to fix it. This template makes weekly the path of least resistance: one row, once a week, thirteen weeks to a page.

A quarter on one sheet, so the trend is unmissable

The reason monthly statements fail owners isn’t the maths — it’s that each one arrives alone, a month apart, and the human brain is terrible at comparing a number today with a number it half-remembers from six weeks ago. Thirteen weeks in a column fixes that. Profit rising, holding or slipping is a shape you can see in a glance, not a comparison you have to reconstruct.

That shape is what changes decisions. Three flat weeks in a row is a conversation about pricing or costs while you can still have it. The same information spread across three monthly PDFs usually gets noticed a quarter too late — which is the difference between adjusting and scrambling.

How to use it (Sunday night, ten minutes)

Once: in Start here, enter tax rate, card fee, your monthly fixed costs and how many weeks a month you trade. The sheet converts your fixed costs to a weekly slice so each week is charged its fair share of rent and overhead.

Every week: total the week’s cash and card revenue, what you spent on goods, and variable costs, and drop them into the week’s row — ten minutes on a Sunday from your till and bank. The sheet returns the week’s net revenue and EBIT, and a running quarter total.

If a particular week begs for a closer look, the daily templates (café, salon, retail, restaurant, barbershop, food truck) break the same maths down day by day — and the free daily profit calculator checks a single day on its own.

From a weekly sheet to a live picture

A weekly spreadsheet asks for discipline once every seven days, which is much easier to keep than a nightly one — this is a template that tends to survive. Its limit is the same as any spreadsheet’s: it only knows what you enter, and it can’t nudge you when a bad week is forming mid-week.

nouz keeps the profit picture live as the days go in, then rolls it up to the week and the quarter for you — so you get the weekly trend this template gives, without waiting until Sunday to see a problem that started on Wednesday. The demo shows it on sample data; no account, no card.