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. 

I am trying to do the same thing.

While we file our taxes by calendar year/quarter/month, most restaurants do not do their internal reporting by calendar month or year.  We report by 4/5 week periods. for example: 

For 2019, January's time period will be 12/31/18-1/27/19 (Monday-Sunday).  In 2018, January's time period was 1/1/18-1/28/18.  (Monday-Sunday)  Different dates!

I use QuickBooks Premier 2018 and this version does not allow for me to compare year over year or month over month using the time periods I need it to.  I realize that I can run a report using any dates I want.  But, when I want to do comparisons, budgeting etc, I cannot generate a report using the time periods explained above.  

Is there a version of QuickBooks that will allow for this?

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@MaryGraceS wrote:

 

To generate a 13-four week accounting periods, you'll need to customize your P&L report.

 

 

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This does not show each 4 week period in columns. You can't do that in QB

Can Advanced Reporting be used to create 13/4 week reporting?

Thanks for visiting the Community space, pac1.

Allow me to join in the conversation and share some insights about creating a report via Advanced Reporting.

This feature allows you to add groupings, calculated columns, build dashboards that include reports as well as charts and graphs. In regard to creating a 13/4 week reporting, I suggest visiting our QlikView Resource page or reaching out to one of our members from the Intuit Resellers Program (IRP) for guidance and assistance.

For more information on how to install and create reports using Advanced Reporting, check out these articles:

• QuickBooks Advanced Reporting
• Training Module
• QBAR FAQ's
• Reporting1 Tools

That should point you in the right direction.  If you have any follow-up questions or other concerns, leave me a comment below. I'm always here to assist you further. Wishing you the best.

Hi - I am a restaurant and have adapted to the limitations of this reporting system by using the four week reporting feature.  I just book things as if the week ends on Saturday even though sales are through Sunday.  The problem I am having now is as I have transitioned to a new year, My four weeks are off.  The last period of 2018 I had to have a fifth week in period 13 to get back on Calendar.  But as I try to run a new four week report for 2019, it will not break from the prior 4 week consecutive periods.  My new four week should be 12/30/2018-1/27/19 but when I run a 4 week report for that period, I get one column for the first three weeks and another for the fourth week.  How do I reset this four week period?  Essentially adjust my fiscal year that is not end of month.  Thanks!

Hi Qdpgh,

We're unable to set a fiscal year to make it not end of month. For this reason, I'd suggest finding third-party applications that can help you create this report. You can find one in the Intuit Marketplace.

You can also send feedback about this to our developers. Simply click on the Help menu and choose Send Feedback Online.

If you have other questions, you can always go back to this thread.

Thanks.  So I guess my next question would be what set the initial four week periods when I chose them?  They were not within a calendar year either.  This was just last year when we started using QB.

Greetings, Qdpgh.

I'd like to add to this discussion and provide additional clarification regarding the Four Week period report.

After some thorough research, I found out that the last week of December and the first three weeks of January are included on QuickBooks' Four Week period report. Also, I don't see any options at this time that'll allow us to change this.

I can see how having this option would allow you to have an accurate view on how the business is doing. That said, I'll also be submitting feedback on your behalf. Feedback is sent to the Management Team to determine what we need to implement moving forward to provide the best QuickBooks experience.

Keep me posted if there's anything else I can do for you in the meantime. I've always got you covered. Have a great day!

Hi - Did you hear anything back on this?  After setting my reporting up to use the four-week report for my accounting last year, it is useless now.  I can only run reports but a single four week date range and not show prior four week periods.  This has turned into a pretty severe limitation.  Thanks.

OK - but just so we are clear - the system will run multiple 4 week periods in a report.  You just cannot change which is the first week of a given 4 week period.  It is arbitrarily set.  Happened to match my periods last year.  But I had to add a fifth week to my 13th period last year to get back closer to calendar year and now I am off.  For the fixed four week report now, the first day for 2019 is December 24, 2018.  Thanks.

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...

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!

Hello there, @Anonymous.

You'll be happy to know that our archive of previous webinars are still available and I'm glad to share it with you.

You can check out this article to view the list of available webinars from February 2017 - February 2019: In the Know Webinars.

Please know you can always come to the Community for all of your QuickBooks needs. I'll keep an eye out on your response.

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

Thanks for the reply but that doesn't exactly give you the period by period reports I find so useful to pickup on trends and identify when entries are hitting the wrong period.  In 2018 the P&L by four week report worked very well for this.  It was obviously designed to do just what I need it to do.  But they rolled over the four week period start date from 2018 meaning the first week of the first four week period is December 24, 2018.  We added a fifth week to our 13th period in 2018 to get back to close to the calendar year.  It could be solved if they let you set your fiscal year to a start date rather than start month.  but they won't let you do that either.  Thanks for your reply, though.

Hi there, Qdpgh.

Thanks for following up on this thread and for the details you've provided.

I can see how having the option to set a fiscal year start date, rather than start month would be beneficial. The Development Team is always on the look out for ideas, as many product and feature updates come from great user suggestions like yours. I'll do my part and pass this along to them.

You can learn more about functionality that will soon be available to you by viewing our Blog: https://intuit.me/2L2zqTv.

Don't forget, you're always welcome here in the Community if you ever have questions. Take care.

Did my solution also have this limitation? i.e., assigning periods using "QuickBooks Classes"? I don't you would have the same problem because two "periods" occuring in the same month does not change the fact that the class-based report would show the correct "period-by-period" grouping; Period 1 would appear side-by-side with Period 2 out of the box (or any Period to Period comparison within a fiscal year). Now, if you want to see Period 1 2019 compared to Period 1 2018, you can make that happen, but the report would be a little ugly because you would have to select a start date and end date for Period 1 2019 that coincides with the start date and end date of Period 1 in 2018. This might result in the report displaying Period 1, some of Period 2, and some of Period 13; however, if you export to Excel (and have Excel editing software) or PDF (and have PDF editing software) you can easily delete the Period 2 and Period 13 columns.