FAQ: How to receive monthly profit and loss report?

If you specify the whole year as a parameter in the Xero profit and loss report, Xero returns cumulative numbers for each of the displayed months. If you want to see the 'Profit and loss' report from 2021-12-01 to 2021-12-31 split by months, you should use the following parameters:

Start Date: 2021-12-01
End Date: 2021-12-31
Number of periods to compare: 11
Period: Month

This will display the report for the last month of the desired period and add 11 previous months to compare values, which is exactly what we need to see.

To get correct P&L values for previous months, specify only one of the following days as the End Date value:

01-31

03-31

05-31

07-31

08-31

10-31

12-31

Reason: Xero API treats the End Date parameter as the last day of transactions for the current month, as well as other months in the report. So, if you specify 09-30 as End Date, the P&L report will contain transactions as of September 30, August 30, July 30, June 30, and May 30. If the current month of your P&L report doesn't have 31 days, specify the next month as reporting. This will return correct values for all months including the current one.