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Customize company and financial reports

by Intuit3 Updated 5 months ago

QuickBooks Desktop offers a wide variety of built-in financial reports that provide different perspectives of how your business is doing. What's more, you can customize these reports based on the needs of the business.

The articles in this series help you:

Note that available columns and filters differ for each report/group of reports because each draws information from the company file differently. Understanding the concept of source and targets is particularly important when customizing reports.

There are several pre-custom reports that will help you easily get a view of how well your business is doing. Some of the most commonly used are the following:

Profit & Loss Detail Report

This report shows year-to-date (YTD) transactions (instead of totals only, as in the P&L summary report) for each income and expense account.

By default:

  • It displays the adjustments column, which indicates if an account has had any manual adjustments made to it.
  • It is collapsed; in other words, for each item containing multiple amounts, QuickBooks combines the amounts into a single amount. Shortening the report in this fashion makes it easier to print.

Note: The default date range is for this fiscal year to date. You can show profit and loss for a different date range by choosing another date range from the Dates dropdown.

To run this report, go to the Reports menu, then select Company & Financial > Profit & Loss Detail.

Balance Sheet Detail Report

This report is a more detailed version of the Balance Sheet Standard report. For each account, the report shows the starting balance at the beginning of last month, transactions entered in the account for this month to date, and the ending balance as of today.

Like the other Balance Sheet reports, this report calculates how much your business is worth by subtracting all the money your company owes (liabilities) from everything it owns (assets). The result is what your company is worth: your business's equity.

By default:

  • It displays the adjustments column, which indicates if an account has had any manual adjustments made to it.
  • It is collapsed; in other words, for each item containing multiple amounts, QuickBooks combines the amounts into a single amount. Shortening the report in this fashion makes it easier to print.

To run this report, go to the Reports menu, then select Company & Financial > Balance Sheet Detail.

Note: Currently, QuickBooks can only create a Balance Sheet and a Profit & Loss report using the home currency. On these reports, transactions using foreign currencies are converted into their corresponding US dollar amounts.

The following summary reports, however, allow you to choose to display amounts in your home currency (the default) or in foreign amounts:

  • A/R Aging
  • A/P Aging
  • Customer Balance Summary
  • Vendor Balance Summary
  • Sales by Customer Summary
  • Purchases by Vendor Summary (if purchase orders are turned on)

To change the default currency for one of these summary reports:

  1. Select Customize Report.
  2. Go to the Display tab and in the Display amounts in section:
    1. Choose to display the amount in either Home Currency only or The transaction (foreign) currency.
    2. Select OK.
  3. Select Memorize to save the report.

Follow the steps below to create a Profit & Loss report that displays yearly data separated by column for easy comparison.

  1. Go to the Reports menu, then select Company & Financial > Profit & Loss Standard.
  2. Select Customize Report.
  3. Go to the Display tab:
    1. Set the From and To date fields to the years you want to display on the report.
    2. From the Display columns by ▼ dropdown, select Year.
  4. Select OK.

Advanced Reporting: Information at your fingertips.

QuickBooks Desktop Pro and Premier users can get advanced reporting features by upgrading to QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise. Give us a call at 888-566-4671 and see if it's right for you.

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