Meridian Help
For owners & accounting

Run your month-end reports

Close out the month with four reports: gross profit, sales tax, payroll prep, and tech productivity.

Owners & accounting

At the end of every month, four reports tell you the whole story: what you actually made (gross profit), what you owe the state (sales tax), what to pay your people (payroll prep), and how well the shop floor turned hours into billed work (tech productivity). Run them in that order and you're ready for the bookkeeper, the tax filing, and payroll — all from the Reports page.

Running the four month-end reports

Open Reports. Click Reports in the sidebar (under Insights). The landing page groups every report; the four you want are Gross Profit, Sales Tax Report, Payroll Prep, and Tech Productivity.

Start with Gross Profit. Click Gross Profit. Use the period tabs — This Week, This Month, This Quarter, This Year — to pick the period you're closing. The four cards at the top give you the headline: Total Revenue, Total Cost, Gross Profit, and GP Margin.

Read the category breakdown. The Gross Profit by Category table splits the period into Labor, Parts, and Sublet rows, each with volume, revenue, cost, dollar profit, and margin. Margins are color-coded: green at 40% or better, amber from 25%, red below that — and a negative margin shows in red so it can't hide. If parts margin dropped, this is where you see it first.

Gross Profit by Category — labor, parts, and sublet margins, color-coded so weak months stand out.

Scan the 12-Month GP Trend. Below the breakdown, the 12-Month GP Trend table shows revenue, cost, GP dollars, and GP percent for each of the last twelve months. A slipping GP % over two or three months is your earliest warning that pricing or purchasing needs attention.

Run the Sales Tax Report. Go back to Reports and click Sales Tax Report. Pick Monthly, Quarterly, or Annual to match how you file, and pick the year. The cards show Total Revenue, Taxable Revenue, and Tax Collected — the last one is the number the state wants.

Check tax by area, then export. The Tax by Area table splits what you collected by tax area, which is how most returns want it broken out. Click Export CSV in the header to download the tables for your filing, or Print for a paper copy.

Sales Tax — pick the period that matches how you file, then Export CSV.

Run Payroll Prep. Click Payroll Prep on the Reports page. Pick the pay week from the row of week buttons (Meridian shows the last eight weeks, Monday through Sunday). The Weekly Summary table lists each employee's Regular Hrs, OT Hrs, and Total Hrs — overtime is everything past 40 hours in the week.

Spot-check the detail. Below the summary, each employee gets their own table of punches: day, Clock In, Clock Out, the ticket they were on, and hours. A punch with no clock-out shows Active in the Clock Out column and adds no hours to the total — chase those down before you run payroll. Click Export CSV to hand the week to your payroll service.

Payroll Prep — per-employee hours with overtime split at 40, backed by the actual time-clock punches.

Finish with Tech Productivity. Click Tech Productivity. Pick This Month, This Quarter, or This Year — or set a custom From and To date and click Apply. The table shows each technician's billed hours against clocked hours using the standard fixed-ops measures: Productivity (time on jobs versus time on the clock), Efficiency (hours billed versus hours actually worked), and Proficiency (the two combined).

Drill into any tech. Click a technician's row to expand the audit detail — the time-clock punches and the operations behind their numbers. If a number looks off, the answer is right there instead of in a spreadsheet argument. Export CSV captures whatever window is on screen.

Tech Productivity — billable versus clocked hours per tech, with the punch-level detail one click away.

What happens behind the scenes

All four reports read from work that already happened — nothing here posts to your books or changes a ticket. Gross profit counts a ticket in the month it was closed (completed, invoiced, or closed out), comparing what you charged on each line against the cost recorded on that line. Sales tax totals come from the tax charged on those same closed tickets, grouped by the tax area on each one. Payroll hours come straight from time-clock punches, with overtime split at 40 hours per week; an open punch counts zero hours until it's clocked out. Tech productivity compares the hours billed on tickets with the hours each tech spent on the clock, with drive time kept out of the wrench-time numbers.

Troubleshooting

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