Customer Balance Reports
Hi, my name is David Smith and I run a bookkeeping and accounting business in Oregon. I have a question for some pro QBOers out there.
One of my clients (now to be referred to as the "business") receives deposits from his clients. These items are attached to a current liability account named Customer Deposits I created specifically for holding those deposits. Once the client terminates the contract with the "business", the deposits are to be paid back. This is done as an expense against the liability account with the transaction assigned to the client.
Now, this client has a difficult time remembering to pay back deposits and record it correctly. So, one of my trial balance tasks is to consistently audit this liability account to make sure that he doesn't owe a client a deposit, or that he needs to record that he kept the deposit for damage.
In QB Desktop this is a simple task, as I have multiple clients who use deposits that are Desktop users. You simply run a "Customer Balance Summary" report, go into customize and put a filter to only look at the account in question. Although this report defaults to A/R, you can change to any account and QB Desktop with show all debits and credits that are assigned a customer as a total. The benefit is that if a client is attached to a credit for $100, and then a debit for $100, those clear and neither that client, nor the transactions show in the report as the balance is zero. So, I can easily audit which customers have a credit to the liability that haven't been returned, or if there is an error where a return was processed for a client but they never had the initial credit created.
Now for QBO. I can not change the account (or I don't know how) for the customer balance summary. I am left to print a transaction detail by account report and manually cross off equal debits and credits per client. This is a nightmare. My client holds deposits for months in some cases and I have to look at 100's of transactions. I have a couple construction companies that I would like to move to QBO, but this is my one hang up as balancing their customer deposit account would be frustrating.
I would love to see in accountant reports the option to change the account filter on vendor and customer balance reports. The inability to select anything other than AR or AP is just to simple for more complex accounting.
I would love to hear someone tell me why I am an idiot and how QBO can do this. If not, I would love to hear some ideas on a good work around. And if not that, I would love to offer this as a suggestion for future updates. Thank you to anyone who took the time to read this and help.