Reports Center Overview

Now that you know how to enter income and expenses into QuickBooks, it’s time to learn how to generate reports to gain insight into the overall health of your business. Financial reporting allows you to take a step back from the day-to-day bookkeeping tasks and look at your business from a different perspective. By taking the time to generate reports such as a profit and loss (income statement) or the balance sheet report, you can see whether your business has been profitable and, if so, what has made it profitable. On the flip side, you can also dig into why your business has not been profitable and determine what the reasons are for that.

In this chapter, we will show you how to navigate through the Reports Center and give you an overview of the reports available. In addition, we’ll show you how to customize reports to meet your business needs. We will also cover how to share reports with your accountant and business stakeholders.

Understanding...

Navigating the Reports Center

Before we dive into how to navigate the Reports Center, let’s cover the five key reports that business owners like yourself should be looking at on a regular basis:

• The profit and loss report (also known as the income statement)
• The balance sheet report, which will provide you with your net equity for the business
• The accounts receivable aging report, which will show you the total amount owed by your customers
• The accounts payable aging report, which shows what you owe creditors and suppliers
• The statement of cash flows, which shows your cash flow activities.

These reports will help you evaluate your business finances and make more informed decisions. In the next few chapters, we will explore generating, customizing, and using each one. As you will see, there are a lot more reports available within the Reports Center, too, which allow you to dig into the details of every aspect of your business.

In...

Reports available in the Reports Center

In Chapter 1, Getting Started with QuickBooks Online, we discussed the four subscription levels you can purchase for QBO: Simple Start, Essentials, Plus, and Advanced. Depending on the subscription level you have purchased, you could have access to anywhere between 20 and 100 or more reports. Simple Start includes more than 20 reports, Essentials includes more than 40 reports, Plus includes more than 65 reports, and Advanced includes more than 100 reports.

The following is a breakdown of some of the reports you will find in each QBO subscription.

QBO Simple Start includes more than 20 reports, some of which are listed here:

Profit & Loss	Sales by Customer
Balance Sheet	Sales by Product/Services
Statement of Cash Flows...

Customizing reports

As discussed, you don’t have to create a report from scratch in QuickBooks Online; you can customize an existing report to get the data that you need. You can save any changes you make to a report so you don’t have to recreate it each time.

The following are the steps we need to follow to customize an existing report:

1. Click on Reports on the left menu bar to navigate to the Reports Center, as indicated here:

Figure 10.5: Navigating to the Reports Center

2. Select the report you want to customize. In this case, we will customize the Profit and Loss report, as indicated:

Figure 10.6: Running the Profit and Loss report

3. Click the Customize button located in the upper-right corner:

Figure 10.7: Customizing a report

4. The following customization window will appear:

   

   Figure 10.8: Options available to customize the report

In the following sections,...

Exporting reports

In this section, we will cover how to export reports to Excel and PDF. In the next section, we will show you the step-by-step process of emailing reports directly from QuickBooks.

When you run a report in QuickBooks, the export data menu will automatically appear in the upper-right corner, as indicated here:

Figure 10.19: Multiple ways to export a report from QBO

The following is a brief explanation of each icon:

• Envelope: Click on the envelope icon if you want to email a report directly from QuickBooks.
• Printer: The printer icon is used if you would like to print a hard copy of a report.
• Paper: The icon that resembles a sheet of paper with an arrow going through it is used to export reports to Excel or PDF.

We will discuss exporting reports to Excel first.

Exporting reports to Excel

As discussed in the previous section, if you need the ability to manipulate the data on a report, or add additional columns and...

Sending reports via email

Sending reports via email involves the same steps required to export reports to Excel and PDF format:

1. Click on Reports on the left menu bar, make sure you have selected the right reporting group, and choose the report you wish to send.
2. Once the report has appeared, click on the icon that resembles an envelope, as follows:

Figure 10.30: Clicking the email report icon

3. Click on the Email option, as follows:

   

   Figure 10.31: Selecting the Email option

   The following window will appear:

   

   Figure 10.32: Completing the required fields to email the report directly from QBO

   The following is a brief description of the fields that need to be completed:

   • To: Enter the email address of each recipient in this field. You can enter multiple email addresses by putting a comma in between each one.
   • CC: Enter the email address for each recipient that needs to receive a carbon copy of the report. To...

Summary

We have introduced you to the Reports Center and covered all of the different types of reports available at your fingertips. You have learned how to run reports, edit the data on reports, and save your changes. We have shown you how to share your data by printing a hard copy, exporting the information to Excel, saving to PDF format, and emailing directly from QuickBooks. This will help you to share information safely and securely on a need-to-know basis instead of giving access to your company data.

For an overview of how to best use the Reports Center to generate the reports needed for your business, watch this Intuit video tutorial: https://quickbooks.intuit.com/learn-support/en-us/run-reports/how-to-use-reports-center-categories-insights-information/00/344862.

In the next chapter, we will dive deeper into business overview reports. As discussed at the beginning of this chapter, business overview reports provide insight into the overall health of your...