Review period

You set a review period start and end when you create an engagement. The scan also reads the date range printed at the top of the Profit and Loss export, and analyzes the overlap of the two:

• If the P&L covers less than the period you entered (say you entered January to December but exported January to June), the scan looks at January to June, since there is no data for the rest.
• If the P&L covers more than the period you entered, the scan sticks to your dates.
• If the P&L header has no date range (for example, it was exported with All Dates), the scan uses your dates.
• If the P&L range and your dates do not overlap at all, the scan uses the P&L range, since that is the only data it has.

QBO prints a range within one year with the year once, as in "January 1-March 16, 2026". Scans before October 3, 2026 read the start of that kind of header as January 1, 2001, which produced warnings that the review period started in 2001. A header that names months without days ("January - December, 2025") was also read as ending on the 1st of the last month. Re-running the scan clears both.

Your entered dates are never changed by a scan. To analyze a different period, edit the engagement's dates and run the scan again.

For the cleanest results, export every report for the same dates you entered; the user guide lists the exact date settings for each report.

Months at the edges of the period

The check for a month with a sudden drop in transactions compares each month with the average of the others. Two kinds of month are treated as partial instead of compared head-on:

• The month the file's activity begins, when nothing in the file is dated earlier. A company that started recording on the 5th has a short first month by design.
• A first or last month that the review period only partly covers. Its count is scaled to a full month before comparing, and a month with less than a week inside the period is skipped.