 QuickBooks Online 2024. Comparative Balance Sheet Creation. Get ready because we don't just do data input. We get totally into it. With Intuitz. QuickBooks Online 2024. Here we are online in our browser searching for QuickBooks Online Test Drive. Looking for the result that has Intuit.com and the URL. Intuit being the owner of QuickBooks. Selecting the United States version of the software and verifying that we're not a robot. Opening up our major financial statement reports like we do every time. We're going to go to the reports on the left hand side. In the favorites we'll be right clicking on the balance sheet. Open link in new tab. Right click on the P&L profit and loss. Otherwise known as the income statement. Open link in the new tab. Up to the tab up top. Closing up the hamburger. There's our balance sheet. Let's do the range change back to 2023. 010123 tab, 123123 tab. Running to Refreshing. Tabbing to the next tab and closing the handbook in. First a word from our sponsor. Actually we're sponsoring ourselves on this one because apparently the merchandisers they don't want to be seen with us. But that's okay whatever. Because our merchandise is better than their stupid stuff anyways. Like our crunching numbers is my cardio product line. Now I'm not saying that subscribing to this channel, crunching numbers with us will make you thin, fit and healthy or anything. However it does seem like it works for her. Just saying. So subscribe, hit the bell thing and buy some merchandise. So you can make the world a better place by sharing your accounting instruction exercise routine. If you would like a commercial free experience consider subscribing to our website at accountinginstruction.com or accountinginstruction.thinkific.com and then changing the range and the range and they are changing. 010123 tab, 123123 and run it to refresh it. Let's go back to the balance sheet because that's the report that we've been focused in on. We want to look at a comparative balance sheet now. Now remember that if you go back into the reports on the left hand side that we did in a prior presentation and we look at all the reports they have over here. We won't look at all of them but note that a lot of the reports that they have have comparative reports within it. These are things that can be created from the standard balance sheet. So we've got the balance sheet comparison here. You've got the profit and loss comparison. This profit and loss as a percent of total and so on. These are things that we can typically create from a standard balance sheet and it's useful to do that because you don't want to be dependent on QuickBooks default reports that are just basically using the adjustments because you have a lot more flexibility you can do if you're able to do your own adjustments with it. So here is the balance sheet. Now note that these comparative reports will be a little bit different when we're talking about a balance sheet and an income statement. We'll talk about that a little bit here but just remember there's a little bit of a difference because the balance sheet is as of a point in time and the income statement has a range to it. So you can apply these same techniques to many different reports as you do however try to think about whether the report you're looking at is a report as of a point in time or a report that is a time frame. Is it more like a balance sheet or an income statement type report and then you'll see how it acts possibly a little bit differently. I mean if it doesn't do what you expect then it might be because it's a balance sheet or income statement type of report that are acting a little bit differently. So there's two ways that we can get multiple dates up top. This is the whole year range that we put here January through December noting that it's the balance sheet so if I was to change this first date to anything that's below this date the numbers will not change as long as I'm on the total. In other words if I went even to 12, 31, 2, 3 as the beginning and ending number no change here, no change. But if I bring this back on over to 01, 01, 2, 3 then you might say well why do we have two dates up top when there's only one here. Well one reason is that when I drill down on this information I get into a transaction detail report that is a range type of report. It's going from January to December. Let's go back. Another reason is that I might use this feature up top, this range up top to then try to report multiple months of information. One way we could do that is we can hit the drop down here and I can use any of these items. So if I want to see it quarter by quarter I can select the quarters and run it. Now I have the quarters. Note here I wouldn't really call this a comparative report so much as a quarter by quarter report because this is just showing each quarters it's not showing the difference between two quarters. So one type of report that can show multiple periods is one where it's just going to list out the periods oftentimes from earliest to latest. It's in like chronological order. Also note that the balance sheet will be different than the income statement. If I go to the income statement and did the same thing quarter by quarter then it gives me a total at the end. That's because all four quarters total up to the year end. On the balance sheet acts differently because these are only where we stand as of the end of the year. Therefore we're not going to total up the four quarters wouldn't make sense. So we could of course do that for days. We could do it for weeks, months, years. If I did it for years then you just change the range to have two years. So now it's going to do two years and put the end of both years side by side. If I did that on this side then it's going to go to years. It's going to give me the two years and then the total again. There's nothing in the first year. It doesn't have the total on this side because we're on the balance sheet. And then we've got the customers and so on which is a little bit different. That's not the comparative reports that we're looking for. Let's bring it back to the total. Let's bring it back to 2023 year. Let's run it. We're back to the starting point here. The other way, and this is what I would call a comparative report, is when we're only comparing two periods. We're comparing two periods and possibly we want to take the difference between the two periods, subtract the two out, and maybe have a percentage between them, a percentage change, a horizontal type of analysis, is what you might call that kind of report. So to do that, you select the drop down here and you can use this previous period button. And so now I have the previous period for the year would be last year. So now it's going to pick up the prior year. So if I run it, run it again. Now we've got the current period up front. Now the comparative reports kind of flip it. We're not going in chronological order. We're putting the current period up front, which is often useful because the current period is the most important period. That's the period that we're most concerned with and we're comparing it to the prior period. There's only two period comparison. We can't really compare multiple different periods because the next step would be to subtract one period from the other. And I can't do that if there's three periods. So this function up top is only designed for comparing two periods at a time. There's a whole lot of two period combos that you can think of. Now nothing's in the prior period. So let's change the date range up top and let's say that we're going from the first part is going to go from 120123. So that gives me just the month of December. So if I was on the totals only, if I remove this, that gives me just December. Same numbers here because it's a balance sheet, but that allows me to then use this feature to say I want to show the previous period, which now of course will be November. So then if I run this report, let's run it. Now I have December here and November as the prior period. Very nice. Then I might want to look at the difference between the two periods. So I could go up top here and look at the dollar change between the two periods. Run it. So now we've got the difference. That's great because that can give us some information. If I pull out the trustee calculator just to see what is happening, K-A-S-T-O-P-P-O-S-S-O-N-D-O I'll order a key, let's say 1204-3752.61. That's the change of 255161. So clearly that's the difference. That's great because we can compare where we stood before compared to where we stand now. You can understand what that might do on the income statement, which we'll talk more about later as well, which is more of a performance report. But it doesn't really help me to compare to other companies. For example, if I wanted to compare to another landscaping company, which was a large company, or if you're a hamburger shop and you're comparing yourself to McDonald's or something, I can't compare the dollar changes and it's not going to help me at all when I'm trying to benchmark myself, compare myself to the practices of a big money-making company. What I can do, though, is I can use the percent change. So this is what you might call a horizontal analysis type of calculation because now we have this period minus this period gives me the difference and then the percent change. The percent change might be something that I can compare and benchmark to like a McDonald's or something, look at their percent change. And oftentimes we might think of doing that more often on the income statement because that's going to be the performance statement, but we'll talk about that later. 1-2-0-1 minus the 3-7-5-2.31, that's a negative 2-5-5-1-6-1, and then I divide that by the prior period. That's going to be the 3-7-5-2.61. Therefore, if I move the decimal two places over, then it's a 68% decrease. This is a general kind of normal kind of calculation for performance information. This is where I was before, 5-2-8-1.52, minus the 5-3-1-9.02. That's a difference of 9-62.5. How do I get to the percent increase in this case? Because it went up, I divide by the prior period, which is November, which is reported in the second column, 4-3-1-9.02, and we have moving the decimal two places over, about 22.29% increase on the accounts receivable. So that's our standard horizontal analysis type of report. Note that we could do that if I start to think about all the different kind of comparative reports we can do, the list gets quite long. Because if I'm trying to give my reports, if it was year-end, for example, and I'm thinking about all of the different reports I want to put into my package to give to my client, then I could give a report that has all the months that it took place, as we saw, which would have all 12 months, all quarters, which would have all, you know, 12 quarters. I can do the years, which would be maybe even more than two years. I could do like a three-year report if I wanted to. And I can then do comparative reports, such as December compared to November. I could do the whole quarter, the quarter-end, if I wanted to do the whole quarter, would be 10-01-23 to 12-31-23, August, September, August, November, December, the last quarter every three months. And then if I was to look at the prior period then, we can see that it would take the prior quarter, 7-1-2-9-30, and we could do the same thing. And I can run that report. So now we have a comparison between those two periods if I wanted to do that. I can do the half of a year versus the prior half of the year. I could start this at, we can say, 07-01-23, and then I can run this report. And then I can take a look at it. Now it went to a prior weird date here. Let me change that. It's going 010123 to 06323 is what I was looking for. So now you've got, as of December 31st, as of June 30th. So you have all those comparisons. And then you might want to compare to the prior period time. And so now let's bring it back. I'm going to undo this. Hopefully I'm going to undo all these and say, run it back to the normal one. And now I'm saying instead of comparing period by period that are next to each other, I want to compare the current period to the same period in the prior year. So that is what this one does. So now I'm going to say previous year comparison. Well, let me fix this now. Let's go from just one month again. Let's go from 12-01-23 to 12-31-23, run it, and then look at the previous period comparison. Now I have the previous year comparison. Run it. All right. So here's the current year. And here's the same month, December of the prior year. Now nothing's in it because nothing's in this practice file. But you can imagine that if there was something in it, then you have another report. And you can do the same things to it. I can give the percentage change and the dollar change. So now I have the current December of the current year to the December of the prior year. And I can look at the difference between where we stood on the current December versus the prior December. And I could then look at the percentage change. Now you could also imagine changing this to the quarters. So I could change this to quarter 10-01-23 and do the same thing. But because this is a balance sheet report, it's still just going to report at the end of the period. So you still end up with December 31 of the current year versus December of the prior year. But you could compare each month to the prior month, for example. And when we take a look at the income statement and think about those different comparative reports, there's going to be a difference because when I look at the quarter, it's going to give us the information for the range of time rather than at the end of the period. So again, just to point out, you want to think about what types of reports do you think would be best to package because you don't want to give too many reports to people but you want to give them enough information that they have what they need and possibly to impress them a little bit. So you might have different bundles of reports that you put together on a month-by-month basis versus a quarter-by-quarter basis versus a year-end basis, for example. And you might want to think about how you can save that information in your system to make it as easy as possible as month-end, year-end, quarter-end happens as time passes. Let's go back to where we've started with this one. I'm going to go from 120123 to 1231. I'm going to select the dropdown and I'm going to go back to the previous period, this time comparing it to November, dollar, and percent change in place. And then the next thing that we might want to do here is to change, for example, the title of the report because it's not maybe a balance sheet is not exactly what we want to call it. If I go into here, we might then call it like a comparative balance sheet maybe, right? A comparative balance sheet. And then the date right here might not be useful because we really have kind of two dates. You might leave it there because we're still starting with that date here, but maybe we want to remove that. So then we saw that we could go to the customize area and we can go to the headers and footers and we can take the report period and remove that. So now we have that gone. And if this is for external reporting purposes, I might also want to remove the pennies and oftentimes I like to make the negative numbers red. So I'm going to go to customize and we might say let's get rid of the sense and let's make the negative numbers. I like to give them brackets because that stands out a little bit more and then maybe make them red. And on the footers, let's get rid of the time, date, and report basis on the bottom of the report. I'm going to say okay. So now it looks a little bit more fancy possibly. If I wanted to make it more fancy, I could export it to Excel and do further formatting, which we might talk more about in future presentations. But for now, if you're thinking, okay, I don't want to have to do that every time, every time I run this report, we could memorize the report. So I've customized it. I could save the customization. It's a customized balance sheet report. And then I'm going to put it in report group. You might put it under your name. So you might say, you know, your name in here and then we're going to add the group. And then we have share with. Now this would be if you wanted to share your report. I'm going to go ahead and save it as is. So we'll save it here. And then that should, it says custom report saved successfully. If I go into the first tab now, select the hamburger and we go into the reports. Then we're usually going to default into this first tab. But now we're going to go into the custom reports tab and there we have under our subtitle of the name, the comparative balance sheet. And if I open this one up, I'm going to, I'm going to, I can't do the right click thing, which is kind of annoying. But if I open it up, then it'll give us it already formatted. And as each month goes by, then I can actually just change the date and we should be okay and good to go. Now note that you, you might actually use your grouping formatting here to actually name the reports so that you can maybe number them and then be able to report them or print them in order. So you can batch them easily. Just some thoughts on how you might organize it. We'll talk about that later. You could also possibly add them to the management report over here. And that will allow you to kind of batch this stuff up in like a management report type of format, which gives you a little more professional look and feel. Or you can get really fancy on it and export the information to Excel and integrate Word and Excel and make your own fancy reports. If you want to, we'll talk more about some of those options in future presentations.