If you are not in Accounting or have not gone through any formal classes, you may want some general guidelines for how to format an income statement within an Excel or Google Sheet spreadsheet. This template and video gives you some tips on what to think about if you are doing so. Note, there are other line items that may come into an income statement not shown in the video and you will see on the example sheet link below I have added a section for COGS and Gross Profit. The general concepts apply throughout even still.
Example Spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ICZxdBXDJy-dwbNv9u0GAog3WLnxcwKB/edit#gid=1254663068 (Hit File and Make a Copy for your own editable version)
To use that template in Excel, simply download it to Excel from the Google Sheet link.
The general idea here is that you have sections, you indent the line items within a section, and then you put a line above the sub-total for that section and bold the sub-total. You can follow that for pretty much all sections.
The one tricky thing is if you have a total that is summing up multiple sections then you need to make that indent further in than all other indents in the sub-totals. So I may do 6 spaces on regular sub-totals and 9 spaces ahead of multi-section sub-totals.
The idea is to try and make it easier for the reader to see the amounts and their labels.
Here is a screenshot of the Income Statement example template that you can access in the link above for free.
Note, if you want to show variable costs rather than cost of goods sold, you can re-label accordingly and then the sub-total of revenue less variable costs is called contribution margin rather than gross profit.
Check out this full Accounting System in Excel that has an Income Statement, Balance Sheet, and Cash Flow Statement all connected with formulas and driven by database style entries.
You may also like this weighted average cost of capital spreadsheet.
Learn how to model sales and purchases on account.
