 QuickBooks Online, Report Formatting Basics, get ready to start moving on up with QuickBooks Online. We're gonna be using a free QuickBooks Online Test Drive searching in our online search engine for QuickBooks Online Test Drive, selecting the option that has Intuit.com in it, Intuit being the owner of QuickBooks. We're gonna be using the United States version of the software and verify that we're not a robot. Holding down Control, scrolling up a bit, we're currently at 125% on the zoom in, selecting the cog dropdown, noting we're in the accountant view as opposed to the business view. We're gonna duplicate some tabs to put reports in as we do every time, right-clicking the tab up top to duplicate it, right-clicking the duplicated tab to duplicate it again, back to the tab to the left so we can go to the reports on the bottom left and open the balance sheet as that is thinking, back to the tab to the right, reports on the left. This time, profit and loss, the P to the L, the income statement, closing the hamburger, the hamburger, range to change. 0-1, 0-1, 2-2, 2-tab, 12-31, 2-2-tab, run it because we wanna refresh it and that's how you do it, you run it to refresh it, tab to the left, close the hamburger, scrolling to the top, changing the range from 0-1, 0-1, 2-2-tab, 12-31, 2-2-tab and run it to refresh it. I'm gonna zoom in a little bit more. 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. So last time we took a look at the balance sheet in general, remembering that the balance sheet and income statement are our major two financial statement reports. Now we wanna take a look at some of the formatting options that we have up top. We have more formatting options in the customized option here. We're mainly gonna be looking at the items which are in, I'd say like the ribbon and then we'll get into the customized options a little bit more in future presentations. Now note that these customized options are applicable to many different types of reports. So we won't go through all the customizations for different reports which might try to point out where they might differ from report to report. The main thing that you want to understand however, is that we have reports that are like the balance sheet and the balance sheet represents where we stand as of a certain point in time. You could tell by the date here where it says as of December 31st and then we have other reports. If I go over to the income statement, like the income statement which have a timeframe. These are performance reports. These are measuring how we did over a certain time range. You need a range in order to see how far you went from one point to the other point. So those are one of the big differences that'll change how some of the functionality of the options up top will work. Back to the tab to the left. Also note that some of these changes are we can actually think of as creating new reports. And that will often take place when we're doing comparative reports so we can compare one period to another period. We can then take the difference between the two periods. We can have three periods. We can have multiple months and so on and so forth. We can compare to the prior year. We can have a percentage kind of column as well. And some of these other reports are actually in as we saw in a prior presentation, the report center. But if you know how to create the reports from the standard balance sheet and income statement, these comparative reports, then you have a lot more flexibility and you won't be as overwhelmed when looking at some of the other reports and the sheer quantity of reports that sometimes they put into the report center. Okay, let's go through it up top balance sheet. So we've got the dates. We can choose a custom date. So that'll automatically change the ranges up top. So we've got today, this week, this year, this month, this month to date, this year to date. Now, normally if you're working in real time, it's gonna be pulling up like the year to date, generally as you're kind of default and then you can change it if you want. We have been changing it manually every time because we're working in a practice problem and therefore not in real time. So it's often required for us to change the date range. But you have the custom date range here or the default. Now note that you might be asking, why does it even have a range? Because if I look at a balance sheet report, it's gonna be the same as long as I have one date. I only need a point in time. I don't need a range, in other words. So for example, this 2001 will not change if I change this beginning date to 11.010122. Now it's only a couple months, but it still hasn't changed this 201.1. If I change it back from 201.0122 and run it, so we're still at 201. So why do I have that beginning point? Well, one reason is that when you double click or drill down on the data, that's gonna take you to a transaction report. And QuickBooks is quite good. Some accounting software will kind of take you to the transaction report, just give you a year's worth of data, no matter what your date range is on the balance sheet. But QuickBooks will kind of vary your transaction report based on your range. So instead of having to change the range here, because now I am in a report that is a timing report. This is showing me how many transactions have happened from January to December and the beginning balance is before that point. So if I was to go back and change this date range up here to 11.0122 and then run it, that's gonna give me more refined data as I drill down on the balance sheet to the data. It starts at 11. And so now I have a lot less detail that I can sort through. So it's actually quite nice. And that's a really nice feature within QuickBooks that they do better, I think, than other accounting software oftentimes. So scrolling back up, there's our date ranges and then we've got the display columns down below. So typically you're looking at the totals when you're looking at a normal balance sheet because you're looking at a balance sheet as of a point in time, you have your total column. But you can break it out. And this is one way you can do those comparative reports. Let's start like by quarter. So I could go by quarter and then run it to refresh it. And so now you've got your balance sheet by quarter. I kind of stuttered there because I didn't change the date. Let's change this date back to 010122 and then run it by quarter. So now you've got your four quarters. So you can think of this as a whole nother report, right? Because now you've got kind of like a comparative report or a balance sheet by quarter report or whatever you wanna call it. You can then change the name and whatnot up top to accompany the change to the balance sheet, right? You can change the title to change that name. So you can do the same thing. You might see it like on a month by month comparison, run it, this would be fairly long if you do each month of the year. But if you only had a couple of months, it might be useful. Notice that these comparative reports are useful, but they're not performance reports. Sometimes these kinds of reports are more useful on the profit and loss because then you're measuring performance. Remember, we're measuring on a balance sheet where we stand as of a point in time. Also just to point out, if I was to say, let's say, let's say we go back to, I could try to go years here and then maybe I go from January to 2023. So now I've got a couple, I've got two years. So that's another way you can do like a year by year comparison. Notice if I do though, if I go back to the quarters, let's say, and then I change this to 123122 and run it. I compare that to what happens on the income statement. If I do the same thing, if I make this go to quarters and everything else looks good, on the income statement, I've got my four quarters and then a total column because it's summing up the four quarters. We don't have that same total column on the balance sheet because of the difference between the type of reports. These are reporting where we stand at any given time. The income statement is adding then the total which is giving you what we earned over that time range and then over the total time range of the four quarters. Okay, let's bring it back to the total here and run it again. So then if I select this dropdown, we've got our options of the rows and the columns. Now, typically we're focusing in on the rows here and because we're on a balance sheet but you can just see the concept in the event that you have a columns to apply it to. Notice it's choosing active rows. So that means that there's been activity happening in the accounts and that allows you to drill down. Notice that this one has a zero in it. You're like, well, why is it giving me an account that has a zero in it? It's not giving me all the general ledger accounts meaning if I went to the balance sheet over here, I mean, I went to the tab to the right and went into the accounting and looked at the register. It's not that all my balance sheet accounts are gonna show up on the balance sheet. It's only the ones that have numbers in them. So why, if there's a zero, is this one showing up? It's showing up because it has been active. It's showing up to allow you from a bookkeeping standpoint to click on it to see the detail. So there's still stuff that happened into it even though it's cleared back down to zero at that point. That's quite nice as the default option because oftentimes we're using this from an internal purpose perspective to drill back down on the data. Now, if you wanted external reporting, you can get rid of that item with a zero because you don't need it there by selecting the dropdown and saying that you want the non-zero items. So get rid of the ones that don't have any data in it. So now that one has, oh, hold on a sec, it didn't disappear, run it, there it is. So now it disappeared. So now it's gone. And then if you wanna look at all the accounts which you typically wouldn't want but it might be useful just to see all the accounts that are not being used if you wanna clean up your GL, for example. So now you've got these accounts with actual blank amounts in them because you haven't been using them. That might be a good way for you to kind of see which accounts are not being used so that you can maybe make them inactive if you don't believe you're gonna use them in the future. All right, we'll hit the dropdown. So active is the default and it's a good default typically. And then we've got up top, we've got the select of the period. So this is here, we've got the previous period, previous year, and then the percentage of row and percentage of column. So this is another way to do a comparative report. And it does it a little bit differently. So just recall that when I did this comparative, if I say quarter by quarter and run it. So now you've got the beginning, the oldest quarter to the newest quarter, reading in time, left to right. Now, if I did back to the total only and I wanted to do a comparison this way to a previous period, notice I can only compare like two periods. I can't really compare four periods. I'm gonna compare one to the other and I'm gonna have the most recent period first. So how would that work? Well, if you did that on a years, on let's say a month, let's say I go from 120122 to 123122. And then I say select the previous period. And so this is if you want a custom date range, this is going from 11-1 to 11-30. Notice it gets a little bit tricky when you pick the previous period because some months have 31 days versus 30 days and so on. If you want a month by month comparison, then typically you're gonna want to have the full month even though it's a little bit different in terms of the number of days. So let's run the report, run it. So now we've got December 1st and November on the second column. So you have the most current month first which is quite common in a type of comparison. So then the other thing that's quite common is to say if you're having a side-by-side comparison, add the dollar change. Show me the difference between the two, running it, running it. And so now you've got December, November and the change between the two. So this is another format of a report. You can think of it as a whole kind of another report. You're comparing one period to another period. And then you might have the percentage change. So I can say add the percentage change. Percentage change often confuses people at first that percentages can be kind of intimidating but it's quite useful for a horizontal analysis to take the current period. For example, 5281.52 minus the 4865.29 gives us the dollar change. But if I wanna compare it to another business, if I'm benchmarking, then I can't really compare it to another business that's bigger than me, which is what I often want to do because I'm trying to improve to be as big as they are. So then I have to compare it. So I have to compare the percent. So I can take that and look at the percentage of the prior period dividing by 4865.29. So that's my percentage increase. If I move the decimal two places over 8.56. So anytime we measure performance, the percentage is quite useful. Anytime you measure performance in a job, which we can see in athletic jobs athletes, for example, obviously baseball players and whatnot, we try to look at their percentages because that's how we have to do it when you have different at bats, for example, and you're trying to measure batting averages and whatnot. So that's gonna be that one. If I hit the dropdown, you could do this with a different period. So if I was to pick a quarter by quarter comparison, the last quarter starts at 10.01.22. So October, November, December, I'm, hold on a sec, let me do it up here. I can do it up here. The last quarter starts at 10.01.22. And to 12.31. And then if I said I want the previous period now, then it's gonna pick, in essence, the prior quarter. And if I run that, now we've got, in essence, as of December, as of September, which it's the quarter ended. If it was a performance report over here, we'd have the performance over the three quarters. We'll talk more about that later. But so, and then we can have the change and so on where we stand. So that is that one. So let's undo that and let's run it again. Let's bring us back to the baseline, which is 0.01.22 to 12.31.22 and run it again. And then I hit the dropdown. We've got the previous year to date. Now you can imagine using this one to kind of do the previous year, but this one will give you a previous year to date comparison. So if I select the previous year to date, I can run it. And so now we've got as of December, as of December, because it's as of a point in time. If I changed this from January to let's say, end point 10.31.22 and run it. So now you've got October to October. So it's taken the year to date. Again, the terminology on the year to date kind of implies like a performance report, like an income statement. So when we go to the income statement, it'll have the year to date up to October, for the current year and the prior year. But now we're as of a point in time because it's a balance sheet. And then if I hit the dropdown and I can do the percent and change this way again with that, so another comparative report. So if you think about these comparative reports, we'll dive into building them more and analyze them more later. But just note, you've got a whole lot of comparisons now. If you're trying to think about how you're gonna be reporting these reports to like a supervisor, you've got a standard balance sheet. You've got a summarized balance sheet. You've got a comparative balance sheet month by month. You've got a three month comparison, a year to date month comparison, a quarter by quarter comparison, a current quarter to the prior quarter comparison, a current quarter to the prior court. You're at difference. So you could come up with, in essence, infinite reports starting to compare different periods with just the balance sheet. So that's why the reports can get quite overwhelming even though they're pulling from, in essence, the same data. So I hit the dropdown again. I'm gonna undo that one. Let's take us back to the baseline and adjust the range to 1231 to two back to the normal. And then if I hit the dropdown, we've got the percent of rows and percent of columns. Now, typically we're looking percent of columns with the format of this report. So that's the one I will choose. And we're gonna run it. So if I run it, then now we've got our percentages again, but it's a little bit different format of the percentages. So now you've got your percentage on comparing to the total. So this would be kind of like an investment portfolio. You're comparing to your total assets. So you've got your cash here or your checking accounts at least, not including undeposited funds, 1002 divided by the total. The total assets, which are down here 23, divided by 23, 436.29 is 0.08 or 8.54 about if you move the decimal over. So that gives us a comparison. And again, we can compare that to other companies and say how much money in terms of percentage of total assets do they have? And this gets a little bit into kind of ratio analysis to help us to kind of benchmark to other companies. How much percentage receivables do they have to their total assets? Is that comparable to me? I can't compare the dollar amounts because they're bigger than I am, but maybe I can compare the percentage. Maybe that'll give me some information that's meaningful to help me. And then on the liabilities, the same thing comparing to total liabilities and equity, which is the same as the total assets. So you can create a pie, think of it like a pie chart kind of allocation for your investment portfolio type of thing, similar kind of process. So let's go back then. And again, now you can do a column comparison and try to do a previous period comparison, right? So you can start to, you can mix and match these up. You know, in different formats possibly. There's no data in this one in that case, but again, once you start mixing and matching this stuff up, you can imagine having a whole lot of different reports and we'll dive into more of them in the future. So let's go ahead and run this again back to our baseline. I'm gonna undo this and go back to our normal report. And then we've got the accrual basis versus the cashed basis. Now accrual is what you typically want by default on the report. And the reason is because if you're on a cashed basis, it doesn't mean that you're gonna just click over to the cashed basis and now you run on a cash basis. It's gonna be dependent on the type of industry that you're in and what forms you're using. So for example, if I go on over to my flow chart we've talked about before, you can think about accrual or cashed basis in terms of cycle. And you might be like on an accrual basis for the vendor cycle, but not the customer cycle or vice versa. So for example, if you're paying on the money going outside of things for goods and services you're purchasing, a lot of small businesses might be in essence on a cashed basis as they pay for stuff just as they become due possibly with the bank feeds creating in essence a check or expense type form instead of entering a bill, which would be an accrual component. But maybe they're on an accrual system for the sale side because they're in a type of industry where they have to send out invoices and track the accounts receivable. So it's just dependent on the industry. If you're on the sale side or revenue side maybe you're in a system where you're at a gig work and you're just getting paid through the deposits and recording the deposits as they come through through the bank feeds and recording revenue that way. In that case, you're basically on a cashed based system or you might be on a cashed based system where you sell at a cash register, at a food truck or something like that where you get paid at the same point in time you do the work or provide the inventory but you also might have to be in an industry where you're landscaping, bookkeeping, law where you have to invoice the client and track the accounts receivable. That means this form is an accrual form. If you're gonna record it and track the accounts receivable it's gonna record accounts receivable which is an accrual account. So note, you don't have to, if you're not on an accrual system if you're on a cashed based system you just start using the deposit form and the check forms. Your bank account forms, your bank feeds are gonna be your primary transactions. If that's the case, you're already on a cashed based system, you don't need to toggle to the cashed based system because you're already on it. If you're using an accrual based system then you're gonna want the accounts receivable account which is an accrual account because you have to track the accounts receivable. So why would they have this toggle up top? It's kind of neat to use if you know what you're doing with it, right? Because now I can say, okay, what if I was to go from accrual to cashed what would that do? Well, if I'm using account receivable to record the sales, then if I switched that over to a cashed based system it shouldn't record the sales or the revenue here it should record the revenue when I receive the payment meaning accounts receivable should go away. Now it's not perfect because I think the inventory kind of messes things up but you would think if I toggled over to here you would remove the accounts receivable because that's an accrual account. You might even think it should remove entirely the fixed asset account because that's an accrual kind of thing as well and you would think that it would remove the accounts payable account. So let's toggle it over and run it. And so now you've got your accounts receivable is gone, right? So that makes sense because that's an accrual account and accounts payable is gone. So now you can kind of see your books on a cashed based system. So that's kind of nice to look at it from a cash flow perspective. It's kind of like looking at a statement of cash flows except this is the balance sheet if you did that to the income statement. So it can have its uses but what you don't want to think of it as is that in order to be in a cash based system you just toggle this thing over to cash based system. No, it's just changing when the revenue recognition happens but you don't want to have that as your driving principle. Okay, that's enough of that. So then you've got your collapse column up here I'm looking at these items. So you could collapse. And so if you had a lot of like sub accounts then it would collapse the sub accounts on them. So these triangles you'll recall could either be due to the financial account grouping like an asset and current assets or just common financial account groups or they can be due to an account type which is here. So that's an account type driven by what kind of Chiell account it is or you can make a sub account which we see more on like the income statement. These sub accounts. So this would collapse the triangles that are the sub accounts which we don't have much at this point on the balance sheet. It's more clearly seen on the income statement. Let's just jump over there real quick to show it. So if I went to the income statement and collapse. So now you've collapsed all those sub account ones if I expand it, you've got a much longer statement. So it'll be significant if you use a lot of sub accounts. And then you've got the sort dropdown. You've got this default sorting total in ascending order. So if I say I want to see the total in ascending order and run it. So now you've got the savings account and then the checking account within this category. It might be better to do total in descending order and run it. So now if I go into some of these accounts like this one right here, other current assets, it would normally have within this category defaulted to the alphabetical order, this one first. But now it's putting the higher dollar amount one first which is useful because that might be the way that you want to normally be presenting the data like within each category. So how is this being sorted? It's being sorted by account type, assets, liabilities, equity and then bank account, liquid assets, accounts receivable and then within each category typically by alphabetical order. But now we switched it to the dollar amount meaning the most important one kind of is on top. The other way you can do that kind of formatting is to use account numbers. Account numbers can be a little bit tricky though because you want to make sure that you're using the right technique of having account numbers or else your account numbers will get all messed up. We'll have, I think we have a section just to give an outline on account numbers if you're interested in looking at them but by default they don't have the account numbers on. So down here, this one's out of order in terms of alphabetical order but makes sense in terms of the dollar amount within that category. So it's not a perfect system but it can give you, it could be a useful thing. So I'm gonna go back to the default and run it again. And so now if I go down here to, where was that, see now this unearned is below this one because it's in alphabetical order within that category. Okay, so you could add notes. So this gives you your little notes item that you can add on it and then edit the titles. This allows you to jump right into the titles. Now this is kind of neat and I haven't used it a lot but it's kind of an interesting component because notice that these titles right here you can't really change because that is just a normal title that they're using. This is a normal financial title but it's usually static. These are driven by the fact that you had the account type that the GL account types are driving these. So usually you can't change them because they're stuck there. And then you've got this equity section which usually is called owner's equity if it's a sole proprietorship, stockholders' equity if it's a corporation, and then partner's equity if it's a partnership. So you might wanna change those and they give you this edit titles which possibly could allow you to do that. So you've got your current assets, your bank accounts. You might call this something like cash, right? And you might call your fixed assets like property, plant, and equipment. That might be the title that you prefer, you know, there. And then you might call your equity like owners which I'm not sure where the comma goes. I get it mixed up all the time. Owners or the, whatever. You know what I'm talking about, that little thing. And then retained earnings and net income. So you might change retained earnings but I'm gonna save it and then this could take a minute. So it might take a while to kind of refresh those but it would be kind of nice to do that and then maybe you can save the reports so that you have the external reporting with those terms that are useful for external reporting if they're gonna be preferred terms because the balance sheet as we saw when we looked at the balance sheet is not really optimized for external reporting just exactly like you would expect from like a reviewed financial statement because it's using these techniques that are helping you for the internal bookkeeping use of it but the more you can do to make it designed for external reporting just right out of the box is good and then anything you can't do you can export it to Excel and adjust, for example. So then we can also adjust the title here. We can adjust the title here. So if I changed it to a comparative balance sheet as we'll do in the future, we can adjust the name of it and then we can email it out which we'll talk more about how to send it to people and we can print it and we also have the preview here so you can see what it's gonna look like as printed and then you can also export it. So if you have Excel, you can export it. We'll talk more about how to use Excel and the exporting feature so that we can get all a bunch of reports possibly on one PDF with the use of Excel exporting and a PDF printer and then you've got your cog dropdown for the display density of a compact option. So those are the general kind of editing components. We'll go into some of the customization options a bit more in a future presentation. I don't think I did anything different in terms of the cog dropdown in the business view. We've just been working in the reports and the chart of accounts. So if I look at the business view that the reports are just in bookkeeping and then I'm sorry, this is the chart of accounts in bookkeeping and the chart of accounts under manage and then the reports are under business overview and reports.