 QuickBooks Desktop 2023 Comparative Balance Sheet Creation 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 then 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 raw castle construction practice file provided by QuickBooks going through the setup process we do every time maximizing the homepage to the gray area the view drop down we're noting we got the hide icon bar and open windows checked off open windows on the left hand side reports drop down company and financial looking at that P&L profit and loss with the range change 010124 to 123124 then we will customize that report with the fonts and numbers change the font to 12 okay yes and okay reports drop down again company and financial again this time the balance sheet though I'm going to change the date this time this way by going to this fiscal year which is 2024 for this practice file and then customize the report again go into the fonts and numbers and change in the font up to 12 okay yes and okay that's the starting process we've been doing every time in prior presentations we've been taking a look at some customization tools up top which are applicable not just to the balance sheet but generally to all kinds of reports now we're going to continue with that process but the tools we look at this time will have a significant impact on the body of the report as we look at tools that have comparative kind of natures to them comparing one month to another month a quarter to quarter this year to last year that kind of thing as we look at these tools notice we'll use the same tool but it could have a slightly different impact depending on the nature of the report remembering there's two primary natures of the report you got the balance sheet type of reports which are as of a point in time one date and then the profit and loss or income statement type of reports which are measuring performance over a time frame you can say how far did we go almost like a distance type of thing that's why we have to have a beginning and ending date we'll focus more on the profit and loss in future presentations we're going to be primarily focused on the balance sheet here but just remember as you use these tools in different reports it could have different impacts given the fact of the nature of the reports as of a point in time or as of a time frame of beginning and an end okay so we're going to do comparative types of reports so there's a few ways we can do this first let's go to the customized reports up top and one way we can do a comparative report is we can change the date range and then change the total down here to whatever we want to be comparing so let's say we're going to be comparing October so I'm going to start from October 01-04 through November 11-32-4 and I want to show the end of October and the end of November one way we can do that is we can go down then below and say I want to go from the totals to the months I'm going to switch it to months down here and note that this is the new area that we haven't really spent a lot of time on down here we didn't really cover some of the stuff up top because it's repetitive it's already in the ribbon up top so our major new focus here with the adjustments is in this area so we're going to go ahead and say okay and so now we've got that comparison we've got October and November now note that if you did that in the profit and loss you might get October November and then a total there but that but we don't get that on the balance sheet because it's as of a point in time so this is where we stand at the end of October and at the end of November so you could do a similar kind of process if you were if you were trying to look at the last two quarters for example you can you could say okay as of 070124 to 123124 so that includes the last two quarters of the year I want to do a quarter now I'm going to break it out by the quarter and then okay so you got the quarter ended in September and the quarter ended in December notice again it's showing you as of the end of the year because it's a point in time as of the end of the frame of those two time frames if this was a profit and loss it would give us the two and then a total for the total of those two time frames and then we could do it for a year so I could say I'm going from 010123 to 123124 and then I want to bring this on back to the years and so let's go to years and do an okay and so now we've got the prior year and the current year so that's one way we can do the side-by-side comparison notice we can also use that tool to have more than two years so I could bring this on back to here and then have three periods that would be would be compared to each other so this adds a lot of added kind of complexity when you're thinking about month-end reports as a bookkeeper that you might be able to give to a client for example because when you start to do comparisons to prior month prior quarter prior year you can you can wind up with a whole lot of different reports and comparative information that you can basically put together but oftentimes we want to see a side-by-side for two months and then possibly kind of subtract out the two months so that we can see the difference where we stood from one month to another month for example so let's go to the customized report and go back to where we started which I was at from let's just do it this way let's say we go back to this fiscal year so that's back to our starting point and usually this is on totals that's going to be our starting point so another way we could do this let's say we wanted to do october and november comparison so we can customize the report now this is gets a little bit tricky to start out with but once you get the hang of it not too bad we're going to use this tool down here which says previous period so what I need to do then is type in the current period up here and then pick up the previous period so if I want to be comparing october and november I'm going to say the current period is november 11-01-2-4 to 11-32-4 the month of november then I'm going to compare it to the previous period and say okay so now we've got that comparison of november and october notice that this way it puts the most current month first that's often what happens when we do a comparison of two months for example because that puts the most relevant data the most current data kind of up front whereas when we did the other comparison type or the other format we saw that it puts the oldest one first when we had multiple months and you would read it from left to right so just be aware of the difference between those two and then of course it would be natural for us to want to see the difference between these two where did we stand as of the end of november the current month and then october the prior month customizing we can then say we'll show me the change in dollar amounts so now we've got the change in dollars of course just taking the difference and then we might want to look at the percentage change and the percentage change is quite useful because it allows us to make comparisons to other companies that we're trying to benchmark to possibly companies in our industry but they're going to hopefully make more money than us probably because that's why we're trying to imitate them and so we can't compare our dollar amounts we have to compare percentages we have to get an idea of the percentage changes in order to do that we add the percentage changes there we have it so there we have those differences now note that the percentage change is calculated just to get an idea of this percentage change noting that it's going to be the difference so you're going to take the five five oh eight five point eight four minus the seven five seven five point seven seven gives us the difference the difference divided by the prior amount which in this case is october and that's going to be the seven five seven five point seven seven gives us our percent change which you can't see because the decimal is too large but there it is two point two places over twenty seven point two eight twenty seven point three about so that's going to be the general idea now note that now we'd need to change the top here in terms of our our name to make it look nice because it's not really a balance sheet it's some kind of comparative balance sheet that we would most likely want to be putting up top and we might want to just remove this date because it's not as of one date we got kind of the dates down here so we might want to put two thousand twenty four or put the dates down here but first let's do some other comparisons let's do a couple others so you might do a year a year to year comparison so if i customize up top or a quarter to quarter comparison so let's say that you had you wanted to compare the last two quarters for example then you would put the last quarter in the last three months which is going to be 10 10 0124 to 12 3124 so october through uh december and then we'll do the same thing down here previous period let's keep the dollar change and the percent change okay and so now we've got the time frame ended as of the end of the last quarter which they only give us one date note because it's as of the as the end of the time frame and then september the end of the third quarter and then of course we could do a year by year same way customize in the report we might say that we want to have this going from 0101 to 4 to 12 3124 and then do the prior period stuff again and so now we've got 2024 compared to 2023 the change and the percentage change so let's go to the customized report again you can also compare to the previous year so let's say i did the the month of november let's say 11 0124 to 11 324 and this time compared to the previous year and so i'm going to say okay and so now we're comparing this month of november to the previous year of november that's another quite common comparison and again you can see how these comparative reports can really multiply the number of reports you might be given to someone periodically if doing their bookkeeping right now we've got okay we've got the balance sheet possibly a summary balance sheet that you can give someone all balance sheet reports is all we're talking about here we could have a comparison to the prior month we could have a comparison that has multiple months up to the year to date that we're currently at we could have a comparison to a prior quarter and then we could compare this current month and the current year to the prior month in the prior year and the current quarter the current right so it could we can go on kind of almost indefinitely with these comparative reports and so i could go to the customized report and then same thing change and change the change the difference so i could see the difference and the percentage change on a year over year change clearly we can make this instead of one month same thing we can make it as of a quarter we can make it as of whatever we want to make it whatever so that's that type of report as well so let's go back to the original one here so let's go back to checking this off and then we'll just do some customization i'm going to go to the first one and i'm going to compare november uh november and october so i'll go 11 124 to 11 30 24 there's our our comparison i'm going to say okay there is that and then i'll do a some customization i'm going to remove these items on the left hand side i'm going to remove this date field because it doesn't really make sense now that we have a comparative report and then we might want to call it a comparative balance sheet or something like that let's customize the reports and go to the header in footer and i'll call it a comparative balance sheet if i misspell anything i apologize here but just for example purposes and then the subtitles so i can remove this altogether or possibly just put 2024 i'm going to remove the date time and report basis that's going to be these the three things we could put our name in the in the footer right if we want name in the footer if we want to put something in the footer and then on the fonts and numbers if i'm going to present this to someone else i like to have the parentheses around the exempt the here and then the red numbers possibly even to make it stand out more and then i usually remove the pennies because they're usually not necessary for decision-making purposes they're just given you know kind of clouding up the report so let's make it look a nice little bit more clean and then we'll say okay so there we have a fairly fairly nice clean report that could be presented if we want to been save this report we could memorize it up top and we could save the report as a comparative balance sheet we'll talk more about how to do this in future presentations but we can save it and we possibly might want to save it for example as like reports that we use internally and possibly reports that we provide to customers and clients externally or supervisors or whatever because we might format basically based on what our needs are internally we might have different needs i might want to see the pennies and so forth internally and then externally i'm going to i'm going to remove the pennies and make it look and change the title and make it look as nice as i can for the end user so that's one way you might think about how you might memorize these reports and create categories which we'll talk about in future presentations also just note that if i go to the report drop down and the report center and we go then i'm going to maximize this to the company and financial and scroll down to the balance sheet reports so if we go down to the balance sheet reports they already have some like comparative reports down here balance sheet comparative this this report basically we could create right and by learning to create it with these comparative tools we can we can come up with a lot more variety of reports we can do a lot more stuff and dig down on the data as is needed much better by being able to make our own comparative reports so it's nice that they kind of have one here but we want to be able to construct them because then we got a lot more things that we can be constructing and data that we can get access to