Contract Labor on P&L

In Cash Basis accounting, expenses and income are recognized when money leaves or comes into your hand, respectively. So, if you get a bill in June and pay it in July, the expense would show up in July.

Likewise, if you do a job in June and get paid for it in July, the income would belong to July.

In Accrual Basis accounting, expenses and income are recognized when you accept responsibility for them, effectively. So, if you get a bill in June and pay it in July, the expense would show up in June.

In short, this is probably due to your Accounting Basis not being correct.

That said, if you have already been in business for a year and filed an income tax return for the business in question, or otherwise made a formal declaration of your Accounting Basis, you may be out of luck depending on what Basis you declared. The government tends to frown upon changing the Basis to suit your financial needs.

I was just told by my accountant that we use accrual for monthly accounting and us cash on our actual returns. 

Thanks for reaching out to the Community, Maggie316. I appreciate your detailed information.

I can certainly understand how an ability to customize a Profit & Loss report so that it pulls dollar amounts based on when each bill was paid could be useful and have submitted a suggestion about it as of today.

You can also submit your own feature requests while using QuickBooks.

Here's how:

1. In the top menu bar, go to Help, Send Feedback Online, then Product Suggestion....
   
   
    
2. Choose a Type of Feedback and Product Area (optional) from your available drop-down menus.
   
   
    
3. Enter any suggestions/feedback in the Here is my suggestion: field.
   
   
    
4. If you'd like, include your name/email in the My name is: (optional) and My e-mail address is: (optional) fields.
   
   
    
5. Select Send Feedback.
   
   

Your feedback's definitely valuable to Intuit. It will be reviewed by our Product Development team and considered in future updates. You can stay up-to-date with the latest news about your product by reviewing Intuit's Product Updates webpage.

As a workaround, you can export reports and customize them further outside of QuickBooks.

You also have the option of checking our QuickBooks App Store for apps which may be able to help you achieve what you're looking to accomplish.

If there's any additional questions, I'm just a post away. Have a great Thursday!

@ZackE  That already exists. It has for actual decades.

You set your Accrual vs Cash Basis for reports under the Edit menu>Preferences>Reports & Graphs>Company Preferences>Summary Reports Basis.

I'm not sure how you're not aware of that, given that you work for QuickBooks.