Hello there, @rtadmin.
Thank you for providing detailed information about your Profit and Loss report.
There are two possible reasons why your Profit and Loss report shows a difference of $20,000 in your income versus your payment transactions.
- You've received a payment directly through a bank deposit.
- The items in your invoices are not associated with the right income account.
You're right, the way to fix this is to manually compare the detailed income report in the P&L and check each customer's reported payment.
- Go to the Reports menu.
- Select Company & Financial, then choose Profit & Loss Standard.
- Double-click the income amount to open the Transaction Detail By Account report.
- Go to the Reports menu, select Sales, then choose the Sales by Customer Detail report.
From there, carefully locate the payment transactions that causes the mismatch of amounts in your P&L report.
If you wish o learn more about the the difference between Cash and Accrual basis and how to set them as preferences in QuickBooks Desktop, you can check out this article: Differentiate Cash and Accrual basis. It also contains important reminder on how journal entries impact a Balance Sheet account.
Please let me know if you have other concerns. I'm just around to help.
