 QuickBooks Online 2024 Management Reports Customization. Get ready and some coffee because we're doing some quick thinking with QuickBooks Online 2024. Here we are online in our browser searching for QuickBooks Online Test Drive looking for the result that has Intuit.com in 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 reports like we do every time, reports on the left hand side in the favorites, right clicking on the balance sheet, open link in new tab, right clicking on the profit and loss, open the link in a new tab. Let's go to that middle tab. We just opened close up the hamburger change that range going from 010123 tab 123123 back to 2023, running to refresh it, tabbing to the right, closing the hamburger. We're going to change the range on the profit and loss or income statement as well. The ranges they are changing going from 010123 tab 123123 tab, run it to refresh it. Let's go back to the balance sheet. That's been the report that we have been focused in on in this section. We've been thinking about in a prior section once we save our reports. First, a word from our sponsor. Yeah, 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 this CPA thinking cap, for example. CPA thinking CAP, you see what we did with like with the letters and this CPA thinking cap is not just for CPAs either. Anyone can and should have at least one possibly multiple CPA thinking caps. Why? Because based on our scientific survey of five people, all of whom directly profit from the sale of these CPA thinking caps wearing this CPA thinking cap without a doubt, according to the survey increases accounting productivity tenfold. Yeah, at least. Yeah, apparently the hat actually channels like accounting energy from the quantum field ether directly into your head, allowing you to navigate spreadsheets faster. It's kind of like how in like the matrix when Neo learns kung fu or at least that's what the scientific survey saying. So get one because the scientific survey participants could really use some extra cash. If you would like a commercial free experience, consider subscribing to our website at accountinginstruction.com or accountinginstruction.thinkific.com and generate our reports. How can we provide them to our client, which I'm usually thinking in terms of a bookkeeper, but you also have a similar situation if you're trying to batch your reports possibly given it to an external user, possibly an accountant, or possibly like a supervisor, the presentation of the reports is going to be very important if you're giving it to someone such as a client. So you might do it periodically, monthly, quarterly or yearly. And we thought about all the different ways or many different ways that we can basically create even just this one balance sheet report with comparative reports and summary reports, vertical analysis, horizontal analysis and so on. So we note that we can give it to a client by emailing it, we can print it and provide it to them in mail or by hand as well, but it's more likely that it's going to be some electronic format these days. If we email it to someone, we would like to at least put the attachments in order and or zip a file. We also could put it on a cloud drive, saving it as a PDF file or even an Excel file and putting it on a cloud drive. We could use Excel to actually put all the sheets on one page and then Excel can be used along with a PDF printer to print all the documents on a one page, which is nice. We'll do that in a future presentation. The other thing we can do is we can go to the tab to the left and in the reports area. We have this manage reports here. So this does a similar thing as what I'm suggesting with Excel, trying to get all the reports on one page and give like a nice little title page in a nice format to it. So our QuickBooks provides a few of these report overviews, the company overview, the sales performance overview, and the expenses performance. We'll just look at the company overview and you can it'll be similar in terms of how they work with the other two as well. So you've got the report period. You've got this month to date this quarter, this quarter to date this year. These will basically change the date ranges of the reports basically automatically. So that is nice. And then we have the preview and then in the dropdown, we can edit it, we can send it, we can export as a PDF, export as a document and duplicate it. Now, because these three are kind of the default ones, I would think about them as the standard template and possibly not edit these ones directly, but rather either create a new one or create a duplicate of one of these existing reports and then edit that one. So you could create another one up top, create the management report gives you a template outline. Because I'm thinking that we're going to do one that's similar to the company overview, we might duplicate that one. So let's do that. If I hit the dropdown, we're going to duplicate that one and that'll give us another one. So now we've got the company overview number one. If I go into the editing, we can say, okay, what if I edit this one? It gives you a nice cover page. You see the preview on the right hand side. You can add a logo if you so choose. It's a cover report for a management report. So maybe if you're not management and you're doing the bookkeeping or something, you might change the name or financial report or something like that financial statements or something like that, you could have a subtitle here if you so choose. I'll just put subtitle so you can see where it appears on this side and report period for the period ended December 31. So it's picking up the period from the report end date and then prepared by prepared by you can put your name here and so on prepare date you have the you could put the date here and that's appearing down here on the page disclaimer for management use only so you could put then the disclaimer on it. So then we want also note that we have the dropdown up top for the periods as well. And if I change the period it should change this field because it's report end date which will change the for the period ended December 31st 2024. And I'm just going to put this like monthly financial reports or something like that. You might have a separate one for the end of the quarter which might have slightly different reports that you want to populate it with then the end of the year or the end of like any other month that's not the end of a quarter include title of the contents type include table of contents. So here's our table of contents down below and then we have the the include this page. This page is we can give a basically overview so we can type in something you know thanks for your business. I'm just putting something in there so we can see it on the PDF and see what that page will do but you can give basically an an intro or you can not include this page if you so choose. They have another page that you can format for it and then by default we have the profit and loss report and the balance sheet and those are our major financial statement reports of course and so then we can add another report here if we so choose and we can edit these reports as well edit the report title. Compare the previous year compare the previous period so we can actually do some default editing within here on these reports but we might want to make our own memorized reports and then pull them in here right is the general idea is what I'm thinking and then you have your end notes so end so I'll just say end notes and then if we don't want this end page for our closing comments we can mark off the thing as being included include a breakdown of sub accounts so I'll leave that as the default let's go ahead and save it and then if I say that we want to then look at a preview so we have the cancel we have the print and preview we have the advanced items here and this gives us the report this is telling us the report end date so that's that thing that's going to pull in the report end date when you see that there in company name is going to whenever it says company name it's going to pull in the standard company name of the company you might be able to change that here if you want something different than the standard company name you've got your header you've got your footer and then show only non-zero rows and columns I would rather adjust this part on the reports themselves and customize the reports which I'll take a look at in a second so there's the advanced settings and then we could save it and then you've got the save as export the document send and so on let's go to the preview and take a look at it so now you get this nice little title page there's not a whole lot of change you can do to this but it looks a little a lot nicer than possibly just sending out an email with a bunch of reports tied to it especially if there's a long list of them then we've got our table of contents and then we have this page which was an intro page which you don't necessarily have to put on there but if you want the intro page you could put a like a nice little introduction here then you've got your profit and loss you can see it's formatted a little bit differently on the formatting but it's pretty nice formatting and then we've got the balance sheet and then we've got the end notes which again this is a page that you can remove if you wanted to if you so choose now I'm actually going to change the report to to a custom let's do or last I'm going for last year so let's do let's see what happens with a custom report from 0 1 0 1 2 3 12 31 2 3 and so I'll run that one and save it and so now we have for the period into December 31st so given that I'm going to close this out and I'm going to imagine that we make a few reports up top let's go back up to the balance sheet and we'll make our couple actually let's go back to the first tab go into our standard reports and I'm going to go into the summary the summary balance sheet summary this one right click and duplicate or open and a new tab and then I'm going to close this out let's just do our standard formatting here I'm going to bring this back from 0 1 0 1 2 3 12 31 2 3 I'll run it to refresh it and then I would like to customize this report and go into the negative numbers bracketed and I'm going to make it red without sense and then the headers and footers I'm going to take off the report time period and report basis and then I'm going to run it and so there we have that and then I'm going to save customization and I'm calling it number one and I'm going to put this into once again a new group which I'm going to say is we did this last time that's why I'm doing this fast I'm going to say this is going to be a group of month and reports and so I'm going to add that that is now in the drop down and save it if I go back to the first tab go into my customizations refresh then this one should show up there it is let's do a couple more just so we have some material to work with let's do our standard balance sheet now so we're going to say the standard balance sheet customize it and I'm going to say let's do our standard no pennies negative numbers bracketed red headers and footers get rid of the date time report basis run it and then I'm going to save customization and I'm going to call this number two report number two and then put it into our group month end reports save it so now over here I'll refresh it and there is our second report back to the right I'm going to do it again this time let's do a comparative report for the end of this so I'm going to say 11 0123 uh no let's do 12 0123 and then I'm going to compare it to the prior period which is November and December and I'm going to say give me the percent change and the dollar change okay I'm going to name this one a comparative balance sheet I'm going to copy that and then I didn't run it let's run it there it is and let's get get rid of that looks good let's go ahead and customize or save customization and so now I'm going to say this is going to be comparative balance sheet report number three and we could go on I could keep going and obviously I would also have income statement reports I might be dealing with back to the first tab reports run or refresh so the point is I'd like to pull these three reports now into my management report let's see if we can do that we're going to go to the first tab again and I'm going to run this from 01 0123 12 3123 I want to hit the drop down edit this thing and I would like to then go into there's the uh table of contents I want to go into the reports so instead of these two reports see if I I'm going to I'm going to let me before I delete them I'll add a new one add a new report and this is going to be boom on the drop down we're going to say now I'm looking for the custom report so there's the custom report right there so I'm going to go boom there's the one I want there's the custom report I'm going to add another one and say that I want the other custom report so there's the custom reports number two and so add that one and then I'll add the next one and we're going to say custom report number three so I'll go ahead and add that and then I'm going to delete the other default reports delete I said I said delete didn't I delete the profit and loss delete okay so there we have those ones and then I might go in and edit it so I can get rid of this first bit month in reports number one so if I hit the drop down and the title I'm just going to delete this end piece so I can just get the title and within here you might even be able to run reports with different periods even though the default is the month in period but let's go ahead and save that I'm going to go into the next one and say let's make this the balance sheet just balance sheet only and then this one we'll edit that one and we'll make it the comparative balance sheet just for the there okay and so I'll do that and so that looks good and then if I go to the next page we've got our ending notes so let's preview this and take a look at what it looks like so now you get this nice little report again not a lot you can do to the title page and stuff but it's a nice little title page right and again it's better than just attaching like if you had 10 10 forms that you're adding and you didn't put them into one pdf it looks more messy so this at least looks cleaner by putting it all in one report you've got your table of contents and I've able to trim down the name to what I want and I'm able to pull in the reports that I want that have I have memorized so we're combining together the concept of memorizing reports and then pulling them in here in a systematic way which we can do that pretty quickly from month to month quarter to quarter year to year and then we have our balance sheet you can see it looks a little bit different in formatting this is the summary balance sheet then when you just print it to a pdf I think but it looks pretty nice and then you've got your this is the full size balance sheet so this is the full balance sheet and then you've got your comparative balance sheet so there we have it and then we've got our ending page so that works pretty well because this looks nicer to email it would look nicer if we give it to someone in a one drive anyway we provide it I think it would look better than a bunch of reports that are not tied together in any way and also definitely a bunch of reports that are kind of out of order obviously in practice we would add more to this not just balance sheet but reports but income statement reports equity reports and possibly sales reports and whatnot but we're just focusing in on the balance sheet right now and just giving you an idea now where does this report system fall short well you can't you can't do much customization to the to the intro page and and the and the title page and and that kind of thing although those pages look pretty nice but you can make a much more fancy title page if you were able to to use you know word or something other some other kind of software for the title page not really a big deal but that's one thing and then the reports themselves have the look and feel that the reports have and QuickBooks itself doesn't have a lot of changeability to things like fonts and and the size of the font the types of the font and different styles of of that nature so you're kind of restricted in that way as well whereas the only the other option you can do is export these reports to excel and if you did that then you have a whole then you have a whole bunch of options for formatting of the reports that would take longer of course but you can think of a similar process that you could do fairly quickly opening them up exporting them to excel and doing whatever formatting that you want to do within there and you can also think about basically making title pages within excel and any other kind of intro page that you want although that's a little bit more tedious but doable and you can integrate excel and word sometimes as well so that you can make a title page in word and then have the reports in excel and get more fancy with the reporting little touches like this however i think it goes a long way for a lot of bookkeepers and accountants because what what what a lot of business owners want and supervisors want they don't really possibly know what the accounting is right they just want to feel confident that the person doing the accounting is competent and if they don't really know exactly everything about bookkeeping just the exactness of the numbers might not be enough to impress them because they don't really understand that so you so at least giving them something that looks nice and is presented well and is organized in an efficient way and is distributed to them in a way that makes sense on a cloud drive that's secure and whatnot all that kind of stuff is going to make them feel good that you'll be around when you're needed which will typically be at the year end so the general idea here would be then whether we use the management reports whether we use excel whether we export as a pdf file whether we email and zip the files then i still think that using the customize method here of formatting our reports could be one of the one of the things we do within our system right if we list our reports here so that we know which ones they are so that we can just do whatever our process is at the end of the month in the quarter end of the year by just either printing these out batching them putting them into a folder zipping them emailing them or putting them on the cloud or exporting them to excel using excel to further format and then create our own financial report on one pdf file that we can then provide to someone or if we're using these reports to make a management report through the default manage report settings having i think this step would make it a lot easier for people to do periodically also just realize that because uh the quickbooks online doesn't have as much option with just simple editing like like different colors or or different font styles and whatnot that and that this report tool is probably used by by most a lot of people using quickbooks unless they're not using anything this is better my order of preference right it would be better to do this than just emailing a bunch of reports that are in an attachment to something it would be better to do this even than have a zipped report and then but this is probably a pretty common that people see this exact formatting from anybody who is a quickbooks person so if you're able to do a little bit more like if you exported it to excel and did something just a little bit different like even just changing the the style of the font of the title or something not going overboard but a little little tweaks like that can actually give a lot more customization and personalization and could could go a long way sometimes so so then the next step would be again exporting it to excel possibly and then doing a little bit more formatting although that's more tedious of a job we'll think about that concept in future presentations