Jobs In Progress report (QBD)

Hi all, 

I'm trying to generate a very specific JIP report. It needs to show things like estimator, office location, and received payments which are not available in the canned reports. I changed up the customer contact list to fit in every thing but received payments. The estimates vs actual report is perfect. The received payments report does not work (they were recording things by customer name and not job, so I can't pull correct information with an "in progress" job filter).

I've tried exporting the three different reports into Excel and merging them. What I came up with was a complete disaster. VLOOKUPS, HLOOKUPS, pivot tables, and lots of banging my head against the wall... Currently, I'm dumping everything into MS Access and running reports from there. That's not the best solution in a company that has never even heard of Access and - let's be honest - Access is a terrible database program. (So is Excel for that matter. *grin*)

Any thoughts? Workarounds? Third party software? I'm using QuickBooks Desktop, Premier Contractor Edition. 

Thanks!