Creating Reports in QuickBooks
Reports are your reward for all that hard work you put in entering records and transactions in QuickBooks. Sure, you can always find individual invoices, sales receipts, and customers by using the software’s search tools, but in order to make smart business decisions, you need to be able to see related subsets of the information you so carefully entered in neat rows and columns.
You’ve probably created at least some basic reports in QuickBooks. You may have, for example, wanted to see who’s late paying you, or whether you have unpaid bills. You might need to know your stock levels, or which purchase orders are still unfilled. You certainly want to keep a close eye on whether you’re making or losing money.
Figure 1: The QuickBooks Report Center displays examples of reports you can create using your company’s own data.
QuickBooks makes it easy to get those answers in only a few seconds. But to get really meaningful, targeted views of your accounting information, you’ll want to shape your reports so that they reveal precisely what you need to know. You can do some of this on your own, but you might want to enlist our help to drill down even further–and to create and analyze the more complex output that some reports can provide.
Configure Preliminary Settings
As often happens when starting a tutorial on a specific QuickBooks feature, the first step is to send you to the Preferences window. Open the Edit menu and select Preferences, then Reports & Graphs. With the My Preferences section open, you can instruct QuickBooks on some of the ways reports should be handled. You can choose to:
- Have the Modify Report window open every time you create a report (to remind you to make any necessary changes first).
- Set your Refresh options. If you always want to have the most current data displayed when you generate a report, you can tell QuickBooks to Prompt me to refresh or Refresh automatically by clicking on the button in front of the appropriate response. Choose Don’t refresh–the fastest method–if you don’t want to be interrupted when you’re working with a report. You can refresh when you’re done.
- Draw graphs in 2D to make them run faster, and Use [black and white] patterns instead of colors to better differentiate between segments.
Each person who has access to QuickBooks can set these Preferences any way he or she wishes.
Setting Up Company Preferences
Figure 2: You must be the QuickBooks Administrator to set Company Preferences.
You can decide on your own whether Aging Report should start the aging process from the due date or the transaction date. Decide how you want Items and Accounts to appear in reports. And if you click the Format button located directly below Default formatting for reports, you can alter their appearance, for example, by changing fonts and indicating what information should appear in the header and footer.
For other preferences, you may need help. For example, do you understand the difference between running Summary Reports as Accrual or Cash? And have you worked with a Statement of Cash Flows before so you can assign accounts to various sections? This is a report the office should be generating and analyzing periodically for you, so don’t worry about dealing with it on your own.
Note: QuickBooks was designed for small business people, not accountants. But if you really want to get the most out of it to make the best business decisions possible, call the office for assistance with any concepts you don’t understand.
Navigating the Report Center
Figure 3: The QuickBooks Reports menu.
Unless you’re working with a very old version of QuickBooks, you have two options for accessing the software’s reporting functions. You can simply click on Reports in the left vertical pane to open the Report Center. Or you can get there by opening the Reports menu (which includes links to other areas, like the Transaction Journal, in addition to lists of QuickBooks’ reports divided by category).
Next month’s QuickBooks will cover several reports and their customization options. In the meantime, as always, don’t hesitate to call if you need help with QuickBooks reports and setup.
QuickBooks is a faster, safer, and more accurate method of doing your bookkeeping than using a manual system is. Still, you may occasionally tire of your daily tasks and wonder what all of these forms and records mean in terms of your overall financial health–and how to create the reports that go along with them.
The actual mechanics of creating reports in QuickBooks are fairly straightforward. You can go to the Report Center, make a selection, maybe change the date range, and voila! Your company’s related data appears in neat rows and columns.
Figure 1: You may be able to get some of the information you need by simply changing the date range on a QuickBooks report.
But perhaps you to see different columns than what QuickBooks’ report templates include. Furthermore, you might want to filter your output for more meaningful, targeted analysis. Some of QuickBooks’ reports–particularly those included in the categories Company & Financial and Accountant & Taxes—can be a little advanced for the average small businessperson with little bookkeeping experience. Yes, they’re easy to run, but they are also difficult to understand so you may need the assistance of a professonal.
We strongly encourage you to let us run these more complex reports, such as the Balance Sheet, for you on a regular (monthly or quarterly) basis. Balance sheets provide valuable insight when making critical business decisions.
But we don’t want to discourage you from working with QuickBooks’ reports on your own either. Some of the easier reports are A/R Aging Detail (to keep an eye on past-due payments) and Unpaid Bills Detail (to see where you stand with your own financial obligations).
Make Reports Yours
Sometimes, QuickBooks’ own report output is a bit too broad for your needs. So the program provides sophisticated customization options. You can work with these to narrow down and shape the data that appears in your reports.
First, columns. Building reports from scratch would be too time-consuming and frustrating for you to do all of the time. And it’s unnecessary, since QuickBooks provides templates for its reports, sets of columns and data filters that would serve some businesses well, but which can be modified by each user.
Try this. Open the Profit & Loss Detail report and click on the Customize Report button in the upper left corner. You will see that the Modify Report window opens.
Figure 2: QuickBooks lets you modify the columns that appear in reports.
The Display tab should be highlighted. Change the Report Date Range if necessary by clicking on the down arrow to the right of the Dates field. You can also create your own custom date range by deleting the dates in the From and To fields and entering new ones, or by clicking on the small calendar icons and clicking on the desired dates.
Warning: Do you understand the difference between running reports as either Accrual or Cash? This is important. If you don’t, let’s get together to go over some basic report concepts.
It’s easy to change the default columns that appear in reports. You can either enter a column label in the Search Columns box or scroll down the list of all possible labels. Click in the space in front of the ones you want to include, and click on existing check marks if you want to remove those labels. You can also designate a sort order, either Ascending or Descending.
If you want to work with the Advanced options, or if you come across a Display screen that puzzles you (depending on the report, you may have some complex choices), let us know.
Figure 3: QuickBooks report Filters screen
When you’re done here, click on the Filters tab. This is a powerful element of QuickBooks report customization. You can limit your report output to data that meet certain criteria. In the image above, for example, you can tell QuickBooks which subset of Accounts should be included. Click on the Billing Status filter, and you can limit the results to Any, Not Billable, Unbilled, or Billed. You get the idea.
You can apply multiple filters to a report. Every one you select will appear in the list under Current Filter Choices.
The Header/Footer and Fonts & Numbers tabs are primarily cosmetic options you can explore on your own, but as you can see from this brief overview there are many ways to use QuickBooks reports as is or customized for your particular situation. We recommend that you work with reports regularly, both on your own and with us. The insight they provide can help your company grow and flourish instead of just getting by.