A single-step income statement focuses on reporting the net income of the business using a single calculation. A multi-step income statement is more detailed and calculates the gross profit and operating income of the business using multiple calculations and an itemized breakdown. Single-step income statements aren’t very helpful for financial decisions that require more in-depth information about a business’s financial health than simply looking at its net income. When assessing a business’s financial performance, you’ll need more than just a single-step income statement. The final step in creating a multi-step income statement is calculating net income. The top section of your multi-step income statement covers your total operating activities.

Instead of just having the revenue, expenses, and net income like a traditional income statement, a multi-step income statement has a more detailed breakdown with components such as gross profit and operating profit. One of the important features of the multiple-step income statement is the sub-total for operating income. Notice that net income is the bottom line but it includes a provision for income taxes and also interest expense. The report will reflect the breakdown of the company’s revenue and expense accounts into operating and non-operating business activities in every multi-step income statement. Hence, it provides readers in-depth details of the income and expenses incurred during business operations. The multi-step income statement categorizes operating and non-operating incomes and expenses.

The next step is to subtract the total of your operating expenses from your gross profit in order to arrive at operating income. Operating income measures the amount of income from operations excluding all non-operating income and expenses. A multi-step income statement is ideal for large, complex businesses that use a long list of incomes and expenses. The last stop for knowing how to prepare a multi step income statement is calculating the total net income.

  • A multi-step income statement reports much of the same general information included in a single-step income statement, but it uses multiple equations to determine the net income, or profit, of the company.
  • The steps for creating a multiple-step revenue statement for the firm are as follows.
  • A Multi-Step Income Statement can be used to analyze company performance and allow for a more detailed analysis compared to a single-step income statement.
  • The selling and administrative expense sections are added together to compute the total operating expenses.
  • Single-step income statements aren’t very helpful for financial decisions that require more in-depth information about a business’s financial health than simply looking at its net income.

The non-operating and other section lists all business revenues and expenses that don’t relate to the business’ principle activities. For example, our retailer isn’t in the business of receiving insurance proceeds. If a tree hit the building and the insurance company paid out a small settlement, the income would not be reported with total sales. It would be reported in the non-operating and other section because it doesn’t have anything to do with sales.

At the top of the income statement is where you put the total operating activities. Start by adding the operating revenues to the document, which is how much money you generate through selling goods and services across the period. The publicly traded company most commonly utilizes multi-step income statements. The primary distinction of this kind of presentation is categorizing costs into direct (non-operational costs) or indirect (operational costs).

These statements include information not found with a standard single-step statement. The gross margin portion includes the cost of products sold from operational expenditures. This is critical because it allows investors, creditors, and management 3 3 process costing weighted average to assess the sales and purchase the financial statement’s efficiency. Single-step or multi-step income statements are available to small enterprises with a simple operational structure, such as sole proprietorships and partnerships.

Overview: What is a multi-step income statement?

It might have lost money from its operations but had a huge insurance settlement that pushed a profit to the bottom line. Operating income and expenses are directly related to the company’s primary business activities, while non-operating income and expenses are not directly related and include transactions such as interest, write-offs, and lawsuits. The first step in preparing the statement is choosing an accounting period to report on. The law states that publicly traded companies prepare financial statements on a quarterly and annual basis.

  • In the above example, we follow the periodic format to compute the Cost of Goods Sold.
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  • If this margin, called gross margin, is lower than desired, a company may need to increase its selling prices and/or decrease its COGS.
  • Readers of a multi-step income statement get an overall look at how the primary business activities of a business are generating revenue and how those practices affect costs compared to non-primary activities.

One of the key advantages of this type of income statement is how much detail it offers. This detail allows lenders, investors, and other key figures and stakeholders to get a better look at the performance of a business. These stakeholders need to have as much access to the gross margin of a business as possible.

Building a cash flow statement from scratch using a company income statement and balance sheet is one of the most fundamental finance exercises commonly used to test interns and full-time professionals at elite level finance firms. Smaller businesses may use the more simplified single-step income statement, unless otherwise required by their creditors or lenders. Typically, larger companies will use the multi-step income statement as it provides more valuable details to its many investors and lenders. Income statements with only one phase are simpler to compile and need fewer computations. In addition, for many small firms, a single-step income statement gives all of the information someone will need to examine the company’s financial health.

Operating Income

Small businesses with a simple operating structure, including sole-proprietorships and partnerships, can choose between creating single-step or multi-step income statements. A multi-step income statement reports much of the same general information included in a single-step income statement, but it uses multiple equations to determine the net income, or profit, of the company. Multi-Step Income Statements take more time than single-step income statements, however, they give the company evaluating them an advantage when it comes to finding trends in the data being represented. The single-step income statement skips the calculation of gross profit and operating profit, instead focusing on the bottom line– net income.

What are the Components of a Multi-Step Income Statement?

If you purchase products for resale, your cost of goods sold is the cost of purchasing those products. Fundamentally, the basic premise of either presentation format is conceptually the same, granted the outcome of either method is to arrive at net income. Upgrading to a paid membership gives you access to our extensive collection of plug-and-play Templates designed to power your performance—as well as CFI’s full course catalog and accredited Certification Programs.

Why Should You Use One in Your Financial Analysis?

This is a particularly pernicious problem when multi-step income statements are being compared across multiple periods, and the method of statement compilation is being altered within the presented periods. In this case, a reader might draw incorrect conclusions from the altered presentation of information. Consequently, when such a change is made, the nature of the change should be described in the footnotes that accompany the financial statements. The multi-step income statement includes multiple subtotals within the income statement.

How to Prepare a Multi-Step Income Statement?

As the revenue and expenses are segregated into operating and non-operating accounts, it provides greater insight into the company’s financial performance. Add the final calculation as a line item at the bottom of your operating activities section, titled Net Operating Income or Income from Operations. Generally, businesses that use multi-step income statements are large, complex companies. Most small businesses and sole proprietorships can get by with just a single-step income statement, since their operations and accounting tend to be straightforward.

The multi-step income statement is a method of presenting the financial results of a company by segmenting the revenue, costs, and expenses into distinct sections. The Multi-Step Income Statement is a financial reporting format where a company’s revenue, costs, and expenses are classified into separate categories before arriving at net income (the “bottom line”). The income statement shows the total revenue attributable to the primary activities of the business, excluding revenues from non-merchandise-related sales. It can be used to analyze company performance and allow for a more detailed analysis compared to a single-step income statement.

Given that a multi-step income statement divides operating income and expenses from non-operating income and expenses, these statements help people gain a better understanding of how a business is performing financially. Readers will know how much profit comes from primary activities such as buying and selling products and services, and how this performance differs from the activities unrelated to business operation. Single-step income statements calculate the business’s net income by subtracting losses and expenses from gains and revenue. These statements don’t have a high level of detail and are useful when making an assessment that depends on profits or net income. A multi-step statement is an income statement prepared to report a company’s sales and revenue, expenses and overall profit or loss for any given period. It is a detailed report unlike the single-step income statement and utilizes multiple accounting equations to calculate net profit for a business.

One of the most important advantages of single-stepping when creating an income statement is that this single-step format is very easy to prepare. It focuses on net income, so it is especially helpful if you need to make an assessment that is based on your business’s bottom line. Given its higher level of information content, the multi-step format is usually preferred over the single step format (which does not incorporate sub-totals and so can be more difficult to read). Here is one example of a multi-step income statement format for XYZ Company for the year 2020.