Working With Reports in QuickBooks, Part 1 

If you’re not creating reports regularly, you’re not making business decisions as wisely as you might. 

You probably make dozens of decisions every day that affect your business. Every time you make a phone call, respond to an email, or have a conversation with a colleague, it’s likely that you’re moved to take some action. You might order more inventory, raise a customer’s credit limit, or respond to an estimate you received. 

You can make some decisions off the cuff based on your knowledge of the situation or some new information you received. But sometimes you need more details. And you need to see those details in a format that combines multiple related transactions or customers, or numbers. 

That’s why reports are so important in QuickBooks – and why Intuit made them so plentiful and customizable. You can’t make smart decisions without seeing what’s working and what isn’t. Which products and services are selling well, and which aren’t? Are customers late with payments? Are you meeting your own financial obligations responsibly?  In this two-part column, we’ll remind you—or show you for the first time—how to use QuickBooks’ reports effectively and comprehensively. 

Shaping Your Foundation 

Even if you’ve been using QuickBooks for a long time, you may not have explored its report settings. There are numerous ways you can make some report setup decisions. Open the Edit menu and select Preferences. Scroll down and click Reports & Graphs. Under My Preferences. You can ask to be prompted to modify report options before opening a report and make your wishes known about graph displays (do you want them to refresh automatically?), for example.  

Company Preferences are more complex. Do you want summary reports to display on a cash or accrual basis? Other options here involve how aging reports determine their starting point and how you want accounts to be displayed. You can also set up default formatting for reports and assign accounts to actions in the Statement of Cash Flows. The latter preference, in addition to the cash vs accrual question, may require a session with us. They’re complicated accounting issues. 

You can establish some preferences for the content and design of your reports in QuickBooks. 

Click OK when you’re done. 

Getting Started 

Open the Reports menu. If you don’t have a lot of experience with reports in QuickBooks, we recommend opening the Report Center. It’s missing several of the options in the Reports menu (we’ll come back to that later), but it allows you to access the most common reports. 

Let’s say you want to find out which inventory items you sold into the commercial market during this fiscal year were the most profitable and which were not making enough profit. Click Jobs, Time & Mileage in the toolbar, then click the Run icon below the Item Profitability report model. You can get some general information from the default settings: what you paid for each item, its sale price, and the percentage difference (profit).  

Customizing the Report 

There are a couple of ways you can narrow down the results to find the content you want. Click Customize Report in the upper left corner. The Display tab is highlighted, showing you your options for this specific report’s format (this varies depending on the report). You can change three things here, as you can see in the image below: 

You can change the display settings for your report in QuickBooks. 

• The Date Range for the report, 
• The display options for your main Columns, like Totals only or Month, and, 
• Your subcolumns would allow you to display profit in dollars instead of percentages. 

If you need help customizing your reports to get the information you need, reach out to us and we can help. 

Filtering Your Report 

You still need to change some more settings to make your report contain only the information you want. Click the Filter tab. This window has three sections. The first is a list of the filters available. The second provides your options for the filters you select. And the third simply lists the filters you’ve chosen. 

You’ll notice that QuickBooks has already selected This fiscal year for your Date filter. Based on the change you made to the Display. You need to add two more filters to meet your goal for this report (the range of profitability for inventory items purchased by your commercial customers). Scroll down in the Filter list and click Customer Type. In the middle column, open the drop-down menu and select Commercial. Then scroll down again to Item and click All inventory items. The window would look like the one pictured below. 

You can filter your report to display just the subset of data you want to see. 

When you’re done, click OK, and your customized report will appear. 

TIP: As you may know, you can export QuickBooks reports into Excel. If your customization results in a very lengthy list, you might want to enlist our help to export your report and sort it, so your profitability percentages or dollar amounts display in ascending or descending order. That way, you can easily see what’s making money and what’s not. 

A Critical Skill 

You can choose not to customize QuickBooks reports much at all. It may be that the default settings often work for you. But we think it’s important that you understand how to change the display and filter settings of your reports when you need to do so. Next month, we’ll talk more about reports and add to your knowledge of this important element of QuickBooks.