Cash Flow is available from Basic. P&L requires Pro.

Cash flow — how much money moved through your accounts. Money in, money out, what is left.

P&L — what the business earned. Revenue, costs, gross profit, margin.

For most businesses these are close but not the same, and the article below is mostly about where they part company.

Four things make them differ. None of them is an error.

Categories excluded from P&L. Some money moves without being income or expense — a loan repayment, a transfer to your own company, an owner's draw. You can mark a category or counterparty as excluded, and P&L will leave it out. Cash Flow still counts it, because the money genuinely moved.

Split transactions. P&L reads the individual parts of a split and puts each under its own category. Cash Flow uses the transaction's original category for the whole amount. The totals agree; the per-category rows do not.

The actual period. If you have told Vault that a payment belongs to a different period than the day it moved, P&L follows the period and Cash Flow follows the day. See below.

Closing balance versus net cash flow. Inside Cash Flow itself, Net cash flow excludes transfers between your own accounts, while Closing balance includes every movement. So this month's closing balance minus last month's will not always equal the net figure between them.

One more, which is not a design difference but a real cause of confusion: a transfer you have not joined yet is counted as a genuine expense on one account and genuine income on the other, in both reports. Joining the two rows fixes both.

Every transaction has a date. You can also give it an actual period — the stretch of time the money was actually for.

An annual insurance premium of 12,000 paid in January, with an actual period covering the year:

P&L spreads the amount evenly per day, not per month, so a 31-day month carries slightly more than a 30-day one and February carries least. No month shows exactly 1,000.

Actual periods are never filled in automatically. Bank and wallet imports do not set them, and there is no rule or bulk action that will. You add them by hand, on the transaction or in the Actual Date column.

Where a transaction has no actual period, P&L uses its date — the same day Cash Flow uses. So until you start annotating transactions, this particular difference will not appear in your reports at all.

On each category and counterparty option there is a P&L display checkbox. Turn it off and that line stops being counted as income or expense.

Use it for money that moves without being business performance: moving funds between your own companies, repaying a loan, an owner's contribution.

It affects P&L only. Cash Flow, the dashboard and custom widgets all continue to count it, because the money did move.

If either the category or the counterparty is excluded, the transaction is excluded. For split transactions the decision is made per part.

A sub-category cannot be included when its parent is excluded. Exclude a parent and the children's checkboxes disappear; their own settings are remembered and return if you include the parent again.

Excluded transactions are not hidden. Open a figure's breakdown and they are still listed, each marked Counted: 0.00, with a note at the top saying how many rows were excluded.

Both reports group by category, counterparty, or any of your custom attributes.

In table view, income and expense are grouped separately — you can group income by counterparty and expense by category at the same time. In chart view each card has its own grouping.

Where a category has sub-categories, the table shows the parent's total with a chevron. Expanding it lists the children, then a row named {Parent} — No subcategory for amounts recorded against the parent itself.

On pie charts, children are rolled into their parent. Click a parent slice to open it, and Back to return.

The period picker offers this week, this month, this year, the previous ones, all time, or a custom range. The default is this year.

Time interval controls how wide the columns are: automatic, monthly, or quarterly. It only becomes available when the period covers more than four months — on shorter periods the report chooses the granularity itself.

There is no comparison with a previous period and no year-to-date column. The table has one Total column for the selected period.

Nothing you choose is remembered. Period, view, grouping and the planned-data switch all return to their defaults when you reload or leave the page.

Both reports include planned transactions by default — the Show planned data switch in View settings is on.

That means the first figures you see include forecasts, and gross margin is calculated from totals that include them. Turn it off to see only what has actually happened.

In table view, clicking a figure shows the split between actual and planned.

Both reports cover every account you have access to. There is no way to limit a report to a subset of accounts.

Figures are in your workspace currency. Each transaction was converted when it was saved, at the rate for its own date, and the report adds up those stored amounts.

Cash Flow's closing balance works differently: it starts from your accounts' current balances, converted at today's rate. That is why it can drift slightly from the movements above it when you hold foreign currency.

If your latest exchange rates are stale or missing and you hold a foreign-currency account, Cash Flow replaces itself with a message rather than showing figures it cannot stand behind. P&L is unaffected.

In table view, click any figure to see the transactions behind it. The breakdown is the full transactions table — you can filter, edit and select from inside it.

This requires access to transactions. A member who can see reports but not transactions sees the figures and cannot click through.

Charts are not clickable, and gross margin and closing balance never are.

A member limited to certain accounts sees the same reports recalculated from their accounts only, including the closing balance. Nothing on screen says the figures are partial — if two people compare numbers and disagree, check their account access first.

Members without report access do not see these reports at all.

There is no export, no print view and no shareable link.

There is no account filter, no comparison with a previous period, and no opening balance row.