How do I determine all my spending for six months?

Welcome to the Community, @David.

I'd be happy to guide you to see your spending for six months through reports in QuickBooks Online (QBO).

To start, you can use the Transaction List by Vendor report to show all the expenses in detail.

Here's how:

1. Go to the left navigation panel, and select Reports.
2. Type Transaction list by Vendor, and click it.
3. Switch to Classic View.
4. Click the drop-down button under the Report period, and Filter the date.
5. Click Run report.

However, If you would like to view the total expenses for each vendor, you can utilize the Expenses by Vendor Summary report.

Here's how:

1. Go to Reports.
2. Type Expenses by Vendor Summary, and click it
3. Switch to Classic View.
4. Select a report period from the drop-down button.
5. Click Run report.

I will also include a helpful article that guides you in memorizing reports: Memorize reports in QuickBooks Online.

Please feel free to leave a comment below if you have any concerns regarding running a report or any other QBO-related issues. I'll be here to assist you.

I am afraid that did not help. Following your instructions, I got a report for a single vendor.

What I want is, for a given time period, the total of all payments in the "Payment" column of my bank register.

Please assume my ignorance, and be patient with me.

Thanks,  David

Hi David,

I appreciate you keeping in touch with us and adding more details about the data you need. I'm here to help you run a report for all the payments on your bank register.

To get a report on all money paid to a vendor for the year, you can run a Transaction List by Date report. Once you've added the appropriate customizations, it will reflect all vendor payments.

There's an option to filter the report to a specific bank register (see screenshot below).

Alternatively, you can run the Transaction Detail by Account report to show transactions in a specific bank account. Try this out and check if you get the data you need for your expenditures.

Here's how:

1. Run the Transaction Detail by Account.
2. Switch to classic view.
3. Filter the report to a specific bank register.
4. Filter the transactions to expenses only.
5. Hit Run report.

Also, did you know you can print the Vendor register and create and customize a report from the Customer or Vendor list? For more information about the process, check out this article: Print a customer or vendor register in QuickBooks Online.

Comment below if you have other concerns related to running purchase reports. The Community and I will be around to help you. 

@David Trimble  

No offense to QB employees, but their advice isn't good.  They are not accountants.

The advice given by @AlcaeusF is close.  However, you don't want to filter transactions by 'expenses'.  Expenditures include uses of your cash for non-expense transactions - inventory, debt payments, equity draws, etc.  Therefore, if you filter your bank account transactions to expenses, you could be missing a lot of transactions.  Run the Transaction Detail by Account report and filter it only by the bank account(s) you want to see.  Then, export it to Excel and total all of the negative values.  That total is your total expenditures, regardless of what the cash was used for.       

Hello David Trimble,

Thank you for sharing your input to help address the issue. We love to see members supporting one another. Have a great day.