Thirteen 4 week accounting period for restaurants?

Hello there, @linajanehayden.

Welcome to the Community. I'm here to help and walk you through in generating a 13/4- Week Profit and Loss (P&L) report. 

In QuickBooks, you can view your periodic financial statements in any time period format you wish, especially your P&L. To generate a 13-four week accounting periods, you'll need to customize your P&L report.

Here's how:

1. On the left pane, select Reports. 
2. Find and select Profit and Loss in the Find report by name field.
3. Set the date range to define the four-week period.
4. Click Run Report.  

The following article contains additional information about this, as well as the steps for saving your customized reports: How to customize reports.

For additional help, feel free to reach out to our Customer Care support. They have the tools that can help you get to a resolution quickly. 

Here's how:

1. In your browser, navigate to https://help.quickbooks.intuit.com/en_US/contact.
2. At the top right, select your QuickBooks version.
3. Select a topic.
4. Click the Get Phone Number or Start a Message button. 

These resources should help to get you back on track.

Thanks for dropping by. Feel free to click the Reply button if you have any other questions about generating a 13/4- week accounting cycle report. I'll be happy to help you further. 

Hi Lina,

I've been away from community for a while, but happened to spot your question today.  I've been doing restaurant books for over 20 years... and frankly my constant search is for a good solution to this problem.

Here are a couple of tips -

1.  There are a few apps that work with QuickBooks online that specialize in reporting.  I personally use Futrli, which allows me to report on a fortnight (2 weeks) for some items.

2.  A friend/colleague Angela Meharg of Datisfy has been developing a way to satisfy some elements of these requirements by using budgeting features and some other neat tricks..

3.  If you are on Facebook, please join us over at Restaurant Accounting Network.  This closed group has a lot of people sharing a lot of ideas on how to best do restaurant books.

4.  I would also recommend stating to QuickBooks in every way you possibly can that the ability to customize reporting periods on reports needs to be more robust.  To date, I think their position has been that reporting apps can handle that.  But since most reporting apps take cues/limits on how they can deal with data from the database they are pulling from, it often means they are only set up to riff off of what QuickBooks can do, at best.  

***If you are interested, I am doing a webinar next week about how to better streamline the bookkeeping process for restaurants.  There will be a particular focus on making the books reflect what really matters to restaurants in a manner that is actually helpful to them.  Tips on how to customize some stuff will be throughout, including allusions to 13/4 periods etc.  So feel free to reach out to me if you are interested.

On a personal note, QuickBooks and other accounting platforms love to use retail and hospitality in advertising.  These businesses are very visual, and frankly come off very authentic.  They typify, I think, everything that is 'small business entrepreneurship'.  

It's kind of no secret to anyone who knows me that in my opinion this means that they owe retail and hospitality a product that fits their basic needs! 

It's ok if QBO and desktop aren't equipped with the defaults necessary for these industries, but shouldn't they be at least more friendly to customizations that they need?  For instance, do a report on last week and it goes Sunday to Saturday.  Which means weekends are split.  Perhaps a great thing for Monday to Friday businesses, but not the best for retail and hospitality, where weekends mean A LOT.  Such a simple thing....

I hope in the coming year Intuit will make an effort to fold in some improved ability to customize the basics (reporting, company defaults, etc.) in their products.  It certainly would help the very business owners whose faces I keep seeing, again and again, helping to sell a product that could be such a better fit!

Just my two cents.

Kristen Nies Ciraldo

Great news! This is possible in QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Desktop/Enterprise. I found an article that can help to explain the details on how to compare custom previous periods: https://quickbooks.intuit.com/community/Help-Articles/How-to-customize-your-Profit-and-Loss-report/m-p/186382

The secret sauce to making this more seamless is enabling "QuickBooks Classes" (for Plus or Advanced QBO). Once enabled, a "Class" needs to be assigned to all "Transactions", whether they are Journal Entries, Sales Receipts, Invoices, Bills, Payments, Checks, etc. A QuickBooks Class needs to be created for each account period, and the periods can be named anything you wish. For example, the QuickBooks Class named "Period 1" represents the first accounting period of the year. If you add the "Period 1" class to all QuickBooks Transactions that occur in the first 4 weeks of the year, in all years. Now, when you view the class-based financials, you are in-fact viewing period-over-period financials. Voilà!

Most would do this in Excel and a tool like F9 would help automate the data pull from QuickBooks

Most would do this kind of report in Excel with a tool like F9 that would automate the data pull from QuickBooks