 QuickBooks Desktop 2023 Report Formatting Basics Let's do it within 2-its QuickBooks Desktop 2023 Support Accounting Instruction by clicking the link below giving you a free month membership to all of the content on our website broken out by category further broken out by course. Each course then organized in a logical reasonable fashion making it much more easy to find what you need than can be done on a YouTube page. We also include added resources such as Excel practice problems, PDF files and more like QuickBooks backup files when applicable. So once again click the link below for a free month membership to our website and all the content on it. Here we are in QuickBooks Desktop Sample Rock Castle Construction Practice file provided by QuickBooks going through the setup process we do every time. Maximizing the home page to the gray area. View drop down. Note that we have the hide icon bar and open windows checked off. Open windows open on the left hand side. Going to the reports drop down company and financial profit and loss P&L tab 010124 to 123124 on the date range January to December. Customizing it fonts and numbers changing it on up to 12. Okay. Yes. Okay. And then we're going to go to the reports again company and financial this time the big the big balance sheet. I can't get there. I'm stuck balance sheet. That's the one. And then we're going to go. This is 123124 customize it for the fonts and numbers change it to 12. Yes. Okay. Yes. Okay. There we have it. That's the setup process that we have been doing every time. And the prior presentation we went over kind of the components of the balance sheet. Now we're thinking of the balance sheet more as just kind of like a standard report so that we can think about the different options that are available to us to be customizing the reports. So although we're going to be focusing in on the balance sheet note that many other reports have similar kind of customization tools. Although some of the tools will be more effective depending on the type of report we're looking at. So there's a couple different characteristics you want to kind of keep in mind in terms of the types of reports we're looking at. One is are we looking at a report that's a point in time type of reports or a report that is a time range. The balance sheet and the income statement are always the reports that you want to be tying back to because those are the major financial statement reports and most other reports will be giving you more data on some line item or multiple line items of these major two reports. The balance sheet report is as of a point in time as we talked about in the prior presentation. That's why you only have one date up here. That's why it says as of on the date. The income statement or profit and loss is a date range type of report meaning that it's showing you what's going on over a time range. So that difference will have implications when we look at some of the options and the customization options. You might also look at some reports that have like a lot more detail such as the transaction by detail report because then if you get into filtering kind of options and that kind of things you could filter by type you could filter by name and that kind of stuff. So reports that have more detailed information for filtering possibilities also is another thing just to keep in mind as we look at the different options going back to the balance sheet. Trying to get back to the balance sheet. There it is. There's the balance sheet. Okay. So first we're going to go through kind of the the adjusting options that are on the face of QuickBooks when we open a report and then in future presentations we'll go into the customized reports which we've seen a couple times just because we've been changing the font and we'll go into each of those items. Some of the items in here being a little bit repetitive of some of the items we see up here in like the ribbon you might call it up top. So I'm going to close this back up and we'll go into these items up top. The customizing of the report that's going to be us opening up the tab for further customization. We have comment on report. Now this is a tool that you might use if you want to like mark up your report to possibly give to like a client or someone working for you or something like that, a bookkeeper or staff so we can comment on the report. If I click that then I can have these little comment icons and if I want to say hey I want to put a note on this savings account, note one and I can put some comments on it. I can save the comment and refer to it. I can put a note here. This is number two and this is going to say this is wrong. This is wrong or something like that right? We're going to say okay and then of course we can save those so if we wanted to save those we're going to say I'm going to save it to this is going to be a comments we'll say comments report and okay and then we successfully save your comments report to review it choose reports comment report so I'm going to say okay and then I can close this back out and then we can go to the reports and then we can go to the commented reports up top we've got our list. If I double clip on that commented report then we can get back into it so that's one way that we can use that commenting tool which is nice could be used from a grading standpoint could be used from a supervisor kind of standpoint to mark off and question about certain transactions or with a client situation you can imagine that being useful closing that back out closing this back out so then we've got the share template so if you were to make changes to the reports such as we did with the font size you could share the report with into it and that might be something that they can put into their shared reports so for example when we go into the reports center up top you'll recall that we had these reports and we have these contributed reports these are reports that we're assuming were made by individuals by customizing reports and then giving them to into it who then allows the sharing with us we're not sharing of course our financial statement numbers we're sharing the formatting of the report that people could then possibly apply to their own reports closing this one back out so we've got the shared reports memorized reports note that if we made some changes to the reports such as changing the font size to 12 or something like that and we want to memorize the reports then we can memorize it up top and then we could save that I could say like this is let's say this is balance sheet number one or something and we can save it in the memorized reports I'm going to save it we could save it to the existing area under accounting okay we'll show you how to change some of these categories later share this report template with others so we can then if you want to share it like internally or with others we'll go into more of these options later but the general idea would be okay and then if I it takes a little picture of it if you have the audio I'm going to go to the reports dropdown and then we can go to the report center and then maximizing this in here if we go to the memorized reports we went to the accounting and here's balance sheet number one if I open that up I won't have to reformat the fact that I changed the font size for example every time closing that back out you can also find it in the reports dropdown and you could go to the memorized reports here under the accounting here's the balance sheet we'll talk more about how to memorize later and what kind of uses that might be useful for but clearly internal use for example if you're changing the font size all the time or external use if you're giving something to some other client and you want it to be customizing for month-end reports those are two nice uses for memorizing the reports we can print the report we can print the report here or we can save it as a PDF which would be a useful tool if we want to then save it and then group the reports together and give them to like a client for example noting that when we print the report we're going to we're going to talk more about printing options later but just note that you got to be careful with you know you've got options if you had a very wide report like a transaction detail report like this report from 010124 so if it was a very wide report then you might have two pages wide you've got some formatting details that you would have to kind of be mindful of when you're printing the report also note that you might at the end of a period be providing multiple reports to somebody and in that case you might want to be able to save them in such a way that you can group the reports and give them into someone in like an email or into a cloud drive and it's efficient a way as possible we'll talk about that later email the reports now to email the reports you've got to have your email account kind of set up within QuickBooks this could be a great tool to email the PDF files for example but it's also again you got to be kind of careful if you're going to be emailing a client like 10 reports at the end of the month that could be overwhelming if you give them 10 different emails it could also be even overwhelming if you give them one email with 10 attachments we might then and we'll talk about how to in future presentations basically download the PDFs possibly group them into a file so that we can zip the file and possibly email that or put that file on a shared drive for sharing purposes for example and we'll also talk about how we can export to Excel and possibly use Excel to kind of easily put all the reports into one file which we can then make into a PDF file so those will be some options which I think are quite useful when sharing data then we can create an Excel file so we can export this to Excel clearly you need Excel for this to work so you have to have Excel in order to export it to Excel but it could be a great tool to be able to export to Excel because then you can start with the baseline report here and you could do other things to it you can make a chart out of it or something like that within Excel you can also do more formatting options within Excel when you export it to Excel so it's a nice tool you could just go to create a report and so here it says in a new workbook I'm going to say okay export it that looks good it should connect to Excel open it up and create a new report within it so there we have it so we'll talk more about those options later and we'll use that tool a lot but it's a great tool also note that if I exported multiple reports we can then use Excel to combine those reports possibly into one PDF file having multiple reports on one PDF file and then be able to give that to a client which could be a convenient way to organize the data so there we have that we've got hide the header so if I hide the header there's no header up top this could be a great tool for internal use in particular because then if you're scrolling down it's nice to you already know what report you're in so you could scroll down a lot more easily possibly for internal use and then you could show the header you can collapse the rows now this is going to collapse some of the rows on the left-hand side typically the rows that are going to be collapsed are going to be the ones that are like sub-accounts so in other words if I go into my chart lists up top and look at the chart of accounts you'll note we have some triangles that are there because of the account type so they're there by account type and then we have others that are there because of sub-accounts that we created so when you collapse it's going to collapse the sub-accounts here we saw those on the liability accounts for the payroll it collapsed these liability accounts all kind of automatically it did not collapse all the other triangles which are there because of account types or because of overarching names for financial purposes like current assets so then you can expand and collapse which can be nice it would be much more visible if you had in like a profit and loss where you've got a whole bunch of sub-categories and you collapsed it right that makes this report a whole lot shorter and then we're going to go back to the balance sheet clearly that would be a tool as well to use when you're trying to give someone a report first without overwhelming them possibly to a client and then on the balance sheet you can give them like a summary report to collapse it make it as simple as possible and then when they ask more questions then try to expand and have other reports that can expand on those questions as opposed to overwhelming them right off the bat with a very long report could be useful then we've got the refresh so anytime you change the data you enter something new in the homepage you may use the refresh button just to make sure that it populated normally you don't need to because normally the settings are set up so it's going to refresh automatically but you might change the settings to say you want to refresh it periodically but or I think the refresh button has always been there for so long you used to always have to hit refresh so it's kind of also there just from it's been there forever so they just kept it there and then we've got the custom dates so in terms of the dates note you could say that you're going to go to this week you can say that you're going to go to this fiscal quarter you could say this last month now notice when I'm looking at this report because we're looking at the end date it might not be as applicable if you do the same thing on the profit and loss even if you're looking at something that ends on 1231 there's going to be a difference between this fiscal quarter and this fiscal year in terms of the number so this fiscal year gives us January through December and so on this month and then you got last year and so on if I go back to the balance sheet so that can give us a nice quick way to organize the data so if I say this fiscal year that's actually a little notice that's the same thing as if I went up here and said 123124 there's no change but one of the nice things is if I double click here on the checking account notice that I have this range up top so if I choose the range sometimes when I type in the date if I choose a custom and I just type the date in then it will be a custom and if I double click on it then sometimes it doesn't show me the rate it just shows me one date for some reason here it's not doing that if I say custom and then 123124 and then double click now it's giving me the whole thing but sometimes it doesn't give you the first date as we've seen when I've done some prior presentations here and I've had to put in the beginning date that's because if I click out of this this is as of a point in time as of 1231 but when I double click on it now you're drilling down to a range so this goes back in time and the range that you put in place if you said it was this fiscal year is going to be that year it's a useful tool to help you to kind of even though the balance sheet is as of a point in time it won't have any impact it's useful to be able to double click on it and then have the transaction detail in essence the general ledger go back more than one day so you can also find that range if you customize the report up top and you've got your range here so if you wanted a custom range you could still put a custom range up there as well and then we've got the show columns so you've got the show totals only show a day show a week so we might often choose like a month for example now because this is again a report as of a point in time it's going to show you the ending point at the end of each month so this is where we stood as of a point in time at the end of January at the end of February at the end of March that's a little bit different if I went to the profit and loss here and let's say we're looking at the fiscal year so I've got the fiscal year January through December but then I change it let's do it this time quarterly by quarter every three months so now you've got quarter one quarter two quarter three quarter four and then the total because it's summing up so remember this has to show the quarter of the activity of what has happened over the timeframe over the three month periods and then it could total up to give you a total if I do the same thing on the balance sheet and let's change this to quarterly which is a little easier to see then it's going to give you the four quarters it doesn't give you a total because the fourth quarter December is the total because these are the balances as of a point in time at the end of each of the quarters it's just something to kind of keep in mind so you've got to basically give an idea of what you want to show here in terms of daily you can do it weekly you can do it monthly and then combine that to the range that you that you're doing in this case for the year and this would be the fiscal year so this is on the fiscal year so if you break out quarterly fiscal year it's going to give you where we stand at the end of the each quarter of monthly the end of each month and so on then let's bring this back to yearly which is the default so year then you also have this sorting so you could sort by total this isn't really that useful for this particular report because because it doesn't really make sense to kind of sort like I could sort from Z to A but now it puts accounts receivable up top so it doesn't really that's weird like there's not I can't think of really any scenario where that where you would want to do that on the balance sheet if I go to reports into the default I can go back here notice that in some cases like on the income statement it might be a little bit more useful if I go to the profit and loss and I sort by total then it still has the income and then the expenses on the income statement and if I then change the sort to Z to A then within each category then notice it has the largest number on top now now that could be a little that could actually be useful on the income statement or profit and loss statement because note that if I put it back to the default it's sorted by income and then expenses remember that by default these reports are sorted as you see on the chart of accounts if I toggle over here by type meaning assets liabilities equities income and expenses balance sheet on top of the income statement and then further broken out into cash accounts receivable and so on and so forth so and then within each of those categories if we did not have account numbers it would be broken out obviously clearly in the expenses it would have been broken out by then the alphabetical order but if we have account numbers we have a little bit more control which they have added here we can order them by the account numbers and have a bit more control and we can also have a bit more control with the sub accounts so that we have these sub accounts that are the parents giving us that dropdown kind of component so if I go to the to the profit and loss especially and I don't have account numbers but even when I do have account numbers then I might not like if I don't have account numbers I don't have any control over the ordering of the accounts within the expense area at all right and I might want to say well I'd like to see the expenses broken out from the highest to the smallest and just because that could be a useful way to see it so if I want to do that then that that change might be useful total and then I'm going to make it from Z to A or Z to A so now within the expenses that kind of it's kind of nice to see okay payroll expenses number one number two insurance within the category of expenses but they didn't put the payroll expenses even if it was higher I don't believe even if it was see even if it's higher than cost of goods sold they didn't put it above cost of goods sold because they ordered it first by type income cost of goods sold expenses and so on so there's that one going back to the balance sheet and then we've got the report basis so you could change from an accrual to a cash basis now the accrual is where you want to be typically by default when you think about these reports you would only want to go to the cash basis if you kind of you talk to your accountant in terms of any kind of scenario that they might have where you would want to go to a cash basis now when you're usually thinking about QuickBooks you would you would you would be on accrual or cash basis depending on the industry that you're in meaning if I go back to the homepage here note that when we talked about entering the data by cycle vendor and customer cycle we said that well if you're in a customer cycle and you just wait till something clears the bank and then you use the bank feeds you're on a cash basis why because you're recording stuff from the bank based on the cash or when you record the sale when the sale happens with a sales receipt you're still on a cash basis system because you're recording income like a check register when you received it but if you have to build the client with an invoice for work done before then you're on an accrual system when you invoice you then create an accrual account of accounts receivable so by you just entering the data you will basically be using a cash basis or an accrual basis system you don't toggling the report back and forth that isn't really the thing that you need to figure out of how you're going to switch from a cash basis to an accrual same up here we talked about if you just enter the checks you're basically on a cash basis if you're entering bills you're on an accrual basis and there's accrual components of payroll if you have to run payroll now if you were to enter an invoice for example that increases the accounts receivable so the accounts receivable goes up this accounts receivable is an accrual account if you were to switch if you were to do your books on an accrual basis and you're using an accrual account like accounts receivable and you were just to flip it off and say I want to be on a cash basis then you would think you wouldn't actually record anything until you got paid until you entered the received payment so what should happen when you toggle that over is that it should remove the accounts of accounts receivable and the accounts payable or accrual accounts the thing that's going to mess it up is inventory inventory kind of messes it up but if I just toggle this over and I go okay I turned that now notice accounts receivable is much smaller so they kind of adjusted the accounts receivable there's still something in it I won't get into it in detail like I can kind of dig into it and say what's going on with it but there's kind of some complications with the inventory but the idea would be for a cash basis the accrual accounts would now be removed here and then here but the inventory kind of messes it up but in any case you would do that because because those are accrual kind of accounts so that could be kind of useful sometimes because you might try to say like on the profit and loss you might say hey this is my profit and loss on an accrual basis maybe I want to toggle over to the cash basis and see if I can get the cash like the cash flow profit and loss so you can do that but you also have another report it's called the statement of cash flows that could also give you similar information on a cash flow basis from so usually we would want it on an accrual here on accrual here if you're using a cash based system you'll be doing so by how you're entering the data into the system and then when we're thinking about cash flows we might generally just use a cash flow report which would be the statement of cash flows which we'll talk about in a future presentation and then finally we have the filters over here we can show the filters and then we can hide the filters if you turn on a filter we'll see how to do that in the future by customizing reports going to filters and then we can use our filtering options here and like I say we'll do that later and usually you'll go into here to sort the filters but you can see the filters up top turn them on and off the filters are most useful not so much with a balance sheet but usually would like if I double click here the transaction detail report possibly filtering by type for example okay so those are the major overview remember that those things apply not just to the balance sheet but to most reports although they can be used for different purposes with different types of reports such as point of time reports like balance sheet and range reports like the income statement or profit and loss and just detail in terms of how many transactions are in there we'll talk more about the customizing area in future presentations