Question

Customer Balance Reports

Forum|Forum|5 years ago
October 18, 2020
11 replies
105 views

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.

AlexV

Level 10

Good day, David.

Welcome to QuickBooks Community! Let me show you how to track prepayments in QuickBooks Online.

The Customer Balance Summary report is merely based on A/R, not on any prepayments that set in a liability account. Let's pull up a summary of the liability account instead and customize it by the customer.

You can follow these steps:

Go to the Accounting tab and select Chart of Accounts.
Search the liability account, then select Run report under the Action column.
Select Customize and make sure that the Report period is correct.
From the Filters section, select a Customer.
Select Run report.

Click the Save customization button to save the customized report for future use. Then, you can access it from the Custom Reports tab. You can also check these links for more details:

Post again here if you need more help. Wishing you all the best!

DavidPBAuthor

This is by far the best workaround I have seen. Here is the issue, if a business has a 100 clients in a period, which for some of my clients that period can be greater than 6 months, I have to go through all the zero balance customers to find the 2 or 3 that we owe. Is there a way to not show customers with a zero balance?

J

JanbonN

QuickBooks Team

It has been 4 years since you posted your need for a customer balance report for QBO that shows all non-zero customer balances. I have the same need and have not been able to get this to work. 4-years later, are there any solutions?

Hello there, @Yankeetang0. I'm here to share some details about the customer balance report you need.

The Customer Balance Summary report allows you to filter for customers with non-zero balances.

Here’s how to generate it:

Go to Reports and select the Standard tab.
Type and click the Customer Balance Summary in the Find report by name field.
In the Show non-zero or active only dropdown, choose Non-zero for both Show rows and Show columns sections.
Click Run report.

On the other hand, if you prefer using the Customer Balance Detail report, you'll need to export it and manually remove the zero balances.

To have the non-zero option for your Customer Balance Detail report, I suggest sending feedback again to our product engineers for them to analyze this and consider adding this in future updates.

Go to the Gear icon and select Feedback.
Enter your comments or product suggestions.
Tap Next to submit.

Additionally, you can refer to this article for the steps on printing, emailing, and exporting your reports: Run reports in QuickBooks Online.

Let us know if you have other concerns with your customer reports in QBO. We're here to help you in any way we can.

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