 In this presentation we will generate, analyze, print and export to Excel a comparative balance sheet within QuickBooks Pro 2019. For more accounting information and accounting courses visit our website at accountinginstruction.info. Here we are in the home tab. We currently have the open windows open. In order to open the open windows you want to go to the view drop down and select the open windows list. We're going to create a comparative balance sheet and we will do so from the standard balance sheet a comparative balance sheet comparing two months in our case comparing the month of January and the month of February. So what to do this we're going to go to the reports up top. We're going to start with the company and financial and scroll on down to the balance sheet standard. We'll start with the standard balance sheet with this will often be a starting point for many types of variations of a balance sheet we may want to consider. So we'll start with the standard balance sheet. Here is our standard balance sheet. We're going to say this is going to be a balance sheet as of 022819 or February 28, 2019 that we want to type into the date and refresh or just click the report. That's going to be our standard balance sheet and it will give the balance sheet title and the date February 28. What we want to do is compare now January and February I want to see January and February see them side by side. So we want a comparative balance sheet to do that we're going to go up to the customized reports up top. Now it's a little bit confusing to consider how would we do this kind of comparison because you might think I'm going to first say why don't we first change the date range from 010119 which would show the two time periods the January through February. So let's first try that because they gave us a date range here and we didn't have a date range here if we do that and say okay there's no change why is there no change because this is as of the end of the date of the time period so it doesn't really matter what the date range is because it's always at the end of the time period why would the balance sheet then give us a range why does it matter a lot of the times it matters for the zoom because now that I have a range if I zoom into something by double clicking on it it will give us that range of data within the transaction detail without me having to then type in a range otherwise it would have just had one day up here and that's not very helpful. So that's really useful so I'm going to close this back out so just be aware that you may want a range even though the reports usually only as of one day so that's one thing it doesn't help us however for the comparative balance sheet so we're going to go to the customized reports and it didn't do what we wanted which was to have the two months happen so the next thing we can try down here is the display columns the display columns says totals only and that's as of the end of the time period that's what the total is going to be we could change the display to be months and that's going to be one thing we can do this range covers two months we want to show this data by month which would you would think break it out then and if we say okay then it does do so we've got january and february and it breaks it out so that's one way we can kind of get to our comparative balance sheet note that once we do that our header doesn't really make sense because it says balance sheet and it just says february 28th whereas now we have a comparative balance sheet which has january and february so that's one thing we want to consider one thing we will change but also note that we may sometimes want the last month first which is kind of a convention a lot of times because we want the most current month which is probably the most relevant to be first rather than going from left to right reading from left to right the least the last month to the current month we might want to read from left to right the most recent current month to the later months so there is a way to do that we can go to the customized reports up top and instead of using months i'm going to put it back to total here so we drop down total and then change the date range for the current month we're on which is 020119 so i'm going to say hey here's the current month the month of february and we want to then pick up the previous month from it by just clicking this item and that's one way that we can kind of reverse the the the months in our comparative balance sheet if we just want to show the two months we could show this range and say then i just want to pick up the previous month and then say okay and now it will flip those two same kind of data here but we now we have february and january so this is this is going to be our comparative balance sheet and we have similar options those kind of options will be similar for a lot of different reports like the profit and loss where we can have the comparative profit and loss and we have similar kind of options do we want to choose the monthly totals differences or the previous time period now we're going to change the headers so we're going to go to customize reports up top headers and footers i'm going to remove the date time and report basis i'm going to uncheck these three we'll keep the our name here but the balance sheet isn't really correct now i'm going to call it a comparative balance sheet comparative balance sheet seems more correct and then we want to say okay it's going to be comparing january and february so we may want to type something like january and we could type the whole thing out or abbreviate january and february depends how formal we want to make this report but we're going to we're going to put something to indicate that of course we have the two months rather than the one month and we can always put something down in the in the extra header and footer if we want to put a name down there of some kind in the header and footer so then we're going to say okay and there we have it a comparative balance sheet january and february if this is something that we want to do all the time this kind of comparative balance sheet with this change in the title then we can memorize this report what we're going to do now is export this to excel and print it as a pdf option and want to just compare the two options as we go through some of these reports in this section we're going to do this by section so we get an idea of how can we sort these reports what are the different ways we can we can put these reports together and how can we give them either to clients or or our boss or group them in our own files so we're going to first export it to excel we had created an excel workbook in the prior presentation we're going to export it to that same workbook new worksheet within it so we'll we'll go to the excel i'm going to create a new worksheet but we're going to put it to the existing workbook existing workbook then i'm going to look for that workbook this is on our computer on the desktop and we're going to go to the desktop get great guitars is where i put it company name and then in reports i'm going to put this into section we're in section two and we're going to put it into the section two reports and we'll say export and this will open up excel and add a new tab here into our excel workbook i'm going to go ahead and grab that excel tab and pull it to the right so i'm going to grab it by left clicking on it and pulling it to the right and then i'm going to double click on it and call it something like comparative balance sheet something like that click off of that and then we'll remove the the view here by going to view the split screens and cut windows and remove the split and so there's going to be our comparative balance sheet remember that if you go and check over here on the page layout you'll see that the header will be there comparative balance sheet if we go back to the normal then we have this option here then we can remove this first tab that always gets created every time we export something by right clicking on the tab and deleting it saying delete and so here's our two tabs that we have now that we've worked in this section in this section two that's useful to have this now because we could give this excel document to somebody or we could give them a pdf file with only one item in it rather than two using this excel document and a pdf printer for example if we went up to the file tab up top and go to print then we could go to the cute pdf printer free printer some kind of pdf printer that's going to save it in essence as a pdf using the printer options notice it only has one worksheet that we're on here and we want to print both of them on the same pdf file then we can go to this and go to print entire workbook and now it shows all the all the sheets on one pdf file so there's the first balance sheet there's our comparative balance sheet so if we were to export this it would create a pdf file with all our reports on one pdf file which is nice because then if we had like 10 reports we we don't have to attach 10 attachments to an email say or have a zipped file with 10 documents in it we can have one document which might be preferable to some clients and that's one way to do it so i'm going to go back here i'm going to close this and save this and we'll say okay next we're going to print it as a pdf or save it as a pdf which you can do by going to print save as pdf or we're going to print it as a pdf once again using that pdf printer straight from here it's going to the pdf printer we're going to print it and it'll save that as a pdf file so it's going to the right place it's in section two and we're going to call it uh a comparative balance sheet i'm just going to say comparative balance sheet and note when i save it now we have two items here so if we were to send this in this format we would have to attach two different items or upload two different items to the cloud somehow or uh or zip the file as opposed to sending one excel sheet which might be useful or one pdf file with those those files in them so we'll save that that's just a few of our options if we want to export or email this report by itself then of course we can send it as a pdf or the report just this report by itself note again if you're sending 10 reports then that that option is not as useful because you're going to have to send 10 different emails and that could annoy people it'd be nice to send one email and put it in as easy a way to open as possible for more accounting information and accounting courses visit our website at accounting instruction dot info