QuickBooks Pro Plus desktop 2022 comparative Balance Sheet creation, get ready because we bookkeeping pros are moving up the hill top with QuickBooks Pro desktop 2022. Here we are in our free QuickBooks sample file sample Rockcastle construction going through the setup process with a view drop down selecting the open windows on the left hand side, we’re going to the company drop down the home page, that opening in the middle, we’re going to maximize it to the gray area in the middle. Now we’re going to be opening up the balance sheet.
00:32
As we’ve seen in the past few ways to do that, you could go to the reports up top, go to the Report Center, you might have a memorized report of the balance sheet in some way, you might have it in your favorites. But we’re going to go down here, as we’ve seen in the past with the default option of company and financials on down to that balance sheet standard, we’re going to be looking at the other customized report options this time for the comparison side by side comparison of something like a prior period to a current period taking the differences between the two.
01:05
And this is a type of comparison that can be used in other types of reports possibly most commonly also on an income statement or profit and loss type report. Although you want to think about it, it’ll look a little bit different because once again, when we apply these kind of concepts to different reports, you might want to group the reports in terms of is it a balance sheet type report, meaning it has one date really necessary. And the items that are going to be reported are as of a particular point in time, or is a range needed, such as the case with an income statement or Profit and Loss report. So first, let’s go ahead and increase the font size.
01:43
As we’ve seen in the past, we’re going to go to customize reports. Let’s go to the fonts and numbers and bring that up to the to the change font here, bring that up to 14 on the font again, 14 with the font for font sake, we’re going to go okay, and this time, I’m going to change all of them say yes, all of them. And then Okay, so there we have some larger font, let’s going to going to close this on the left hand side to give us a little bit more room. So let’s say we want to have a comparative report and we want to be comparing, say, the December to the prior month, then we could do a comparative type of report a couple of different ways.
02:20
The first way we’ve seen in the past is to change, I have a combination of changing in essence, these totals here with the range that we’re going to be selecting. So in other words, this only has one date right here, if I was to go to the Customize reports up top and change the date range, say I want to change it for 1111 Oh 123 to 1230 123. If I make that change only, and say okay, has no impact on the actual report itself, because it’s a balance sheet report, these are the total numbers reported as of the end of the period, it does have a change. If I double click on this and zoom in on it with the date date range of the transaction, Detail Report transaction by Account Report, that would be have the date range down below.
03:11
Closing this back out. Now however, once I have that range up top, I can then change my show columns line to say I want to show it in terms of months. So I’m going to say must the second month is still going to be showing that that 36 14194. So I’m gonna say months. And so you still have that in December, because that’s still the same point in time. But as of the end of November, then we have this amount as of the end of November. And you’ve got that comparative sequence. Notice that the comparison that we’re showing here now has the prior month and then the current month in this format, you could also do more comparisons other than just two periods.
03:50
So I could change this and say I don’t want it for months, but I want it for say, weeks, let’s say weeks. And then we can have the comparison on a weekly basis as we seen in the past. And and have you know multiple kind of comparisons as of the end of the time period, combining the range, as well as this, this total column, or that the period that would be covered. Let’s bring it back two months. So there we have it. So now the next way we might want to see it is we might want to say well, I’d like to compare two periods. And then I’d like another column, subtracting out those two periods to see what the change is, and possibly even a percentage column to give me the percentage change.
04:27
To do that, we’re going to do a whole nother system, a whole nother system to get this comparison. And so I’m going to convert it back to the original numbers, which means I’m going to take the drop down, go back to the totals only so we now we have just the totals. Now I’m going to do it a different way. I’m going to go to the customized reports. And now we’re going to use these items down below that we hadn’t seen last time for our comparison. So for this method, you’ll note here it says you got the previous period and you’ve got the previous year we’re going to use those items. So the first thing we need to do is set up the current short period. And then if I click this item, it’ll give me the previous period as a comparison.
05:05
So the current period, I need to have then to be the one month, so I’m going to make an old one, I’m sorry, 12 Oh 123. So that So December 1 to December 31. So then once I have that, I can then select the previous period, which should be then the previous month. And I’m going to say, okay, and that should give us a month by month comparison. Now note in prior in prior formats of the software, I had some kind of issues like if you compared one month with 30 days, and one month that has, you know, 31 days, then it would compare basically a little bit of a different timeframe, because it would try to compare equivalent timeframes.
05:48
If that’s the case, I believe, you can change that by going to the drop down here. And making this a month by month comparison. So it’s still month, compared to month. And so if you have a situation where you tried to compare to the prior period, in a tried to compare the last 30 days and less instead of the last month, which which actually has a different number of days, or the last 31 days instead of the last month, then then you might be able to adjust that by basically then hitting this drop down and go into the month by month. But in this case, now we got the two months compared side by side note this time, however, it’s got the current month on the left.
06:23
So it’s not going from oldest to newest, but it’s going from newest back to oldest, which is possibly the way to see it. Oftentimes, oftentimes, reports are formatted that way, because it gives you the most relevant data upfront compared to the prior data. This is the opposite of the other format that we looked at, which did go from the prior period to the current period. Once we have that, then all the way on down, we might want to then make a comparison and see what the difference is between these two. So we could do that by going to the customized reports up top.
06:54
And now I want to say I want to see the the dollar change dollar change, and just say okay, so now we’ve got this dollar change that’s taking place the difference between the two, if we pulled out then the trusty calculator to do some calculations trusty calculator, then we could just subtract those two out giant calculator, it gets excited when haven’t used the calculator for a while. So it has jumped out beyond huge 1619 4.1 minus, or this case, it would be minus a plus 4435 8.61. So the difference is 80,000 552. And the next one is going to be 1791 0.19 minus 43410. point one nine, that gives us the 25 five, and so on.
07:42
The next thing we might want is a percentage difference, the percentage difference often confusing people because people sometimes don’t like ratios and percentages, but they’re really necessary if you’re going to be comparison, comparing different things, especially if they’re performance related type of activities. So any kind of job performance or financial data, you got to get the percentages, typically at some point, so we’re going to go to the Customize reports, we’re going to go to the percent change. And okay, so there we have it. Now this is going to be like a horizontal type of analysis with regards to the percent change.
08:16
So here, for example, let’s take a look at the second one, it went from it went from 1791 0.19 minus 243 4.0, point one nine down by 25. Five, if I take that change that difference, and then divide it by the previous balance, which is this 43 divided by the for three for 1.19. Move the decimal two places over, we got a 50 58.7 decrease in the amount. So that’s how you can kind of read that. And that’s useful because if I was to compare, say, a comparative Balance Sheet from my company, to another company, which is a very large construction company, in this case, then I might try to be benchmarking, comparing and copy and kind of what they do to see if I can line up to what they’re doing if they’re doing something well.
09:07
But I can’t do that by the dollar amount comparison, because they have bigger dollar amounts, what I can do is try to figure out what their percent change has been. And that could be useful. Now note that this percent change might be more useful on the income statement, when we’re trying to think about, you know, what has happened to revenue year over year on a performance change.
09:29
We’ll talk about that in future presentations. Another percentage that would be good on the balance sheet, which you would often think about and see when you’re talking about basically, investing kind of strategies would be you know, what’s the percent of the total assets that we have in cash compared to accounts receivable, compared to the other current assets and so on so forth. That’s a vertical kind of analysis. And we might talk about that, in future we will talk about that in future presentations as well. But in essence, there’s our side by side compare
10:00
And nice comparative change there. Now then we might want to make some adjustments then to the header up top if I was to give this or present this to somebody, because because now I’ve got the balance sheet up top, it’s not really a balance sheet, it’s a comparative Balance Sheet at this point in time. And the date is as of December 31 2023. But really, it’s not because I’ve got two dates that are up top, so I can change that or possibly remove it. And then I got the timestamps on the left, which I don’t really like. So I’m going to get rid of those. And then I want my name on the footer to say that I, we did it, this is our thing.
10:33
So that’s going to be so let’s try that we’re going to say customize reports. And we’ll do some formatting on the headers and the footers. And we’re gonna say I don’t want the time, that report basis. And, and the date, I don’t need these things on the left hand that inside, get rid of those, get rid of those, those are no good. And then the footer will keep the page number and we’ll put our name here, name. So everybody knows that name, did it. And then we got the print further on the first page that looks good. So if I say Okay, so now that’s gone.
11:08
And then we still need to get rid of this sub header that needs to go. That’s not right. Let’s go customize header and footer, let’s make the name of it. It’s not a balance sheet anymore. It’s a comparative Balance Sheet. It’s a comparative Balance Sheet. Because it’s comparing, I’m going to make it a comparative Balance Sheet. So there we have that, and then this one, we don’t need that. So let’s get rid of that entirely. That will be removed completely. Okay, check it out.
11:36
So there we have that, that looks good comparative Balance Sheet. If I go to the printing options, take a look at what it looks like on the report. See what it looks like there, preview it. So there we have it. And so looks, it looks good there. And then my footer, I got my name footer down there, that looks good. Notice when I printed it, it’s got this on there by default. Now, because that was my last setting that I had to squished it in to one page wide, which is probably the setting that you want by default. But again, it’ll change the font sizes.
12:08
When you do that, we’ll talk more about that later. We’ll say we’ll say okay, let’s say okay, so that looks good. I don’t need the pennies, let’s get rid of the pennies. And then I’m going to make the negative numbers like on on the depreciation here or accumulated depreciation negative and read. Let’s do that. So I’m going to say, customize fonts and numbers, we’re going to say, I don’t want the sense, my report makes sense. Without the sense, I can make sense with no sense involved in my report. So there we have that, that’ll remove the pennies, and then we’re gonna make parentheses instead of the negative sign and make the negative stuff red, to make it stand out. That’ll look way better.
12:51
So let’s try it, we’re gonna say, okay, there we got it. So we got the red, the pennies are gone. So that looks good. Looks pretty good. It’s pretty fancy. So that would be a general kind of comparative type of report. So you could do other kinds of comparative reports as well. So if I go to the Customize items up top, we could do the same thing for a previous year, you can do the previous year, either way, you could select the entire year and go to the previous year, where you go to that use the previous year items down below. And so I’m going to say okay, here,
13:22
I just want to point out that this basic report is they’ve made some of these comparative reports by default available to you. So let’s take a look at some of those, if I go to the reports drop down company and financial. Notice down here, you got the standard balance sheet, you got the balance sheet, deal detail, and then you got here the balance sheet previous year comparison, that’s a kind of comparative Balance Sheet that they’re basically using our tools to make as a default, let’s take a look at it. So you’ll see here, they put up top the balance sheet, previous year comparison. And so this is a form of off comparative Balance Sheet.
13:56
And you can use some of these reports that they make that are kind of deviations or customizations on the standard balance sheet and income statement to deconstruct them and see how they were constructed using the tools that are available to us. So we could say okay, Customize Report up top. And you could say okay, I’d see what they did here, they just took the balance sheet, they then put the previous year here for it the dates, one 123 to the current date, as of now according to the practice problem, which is 1215 23 in this case, and then they just click the previous year, so that we have the 2023 data 2022 then added the change in the dollar amount and the percent and so there there we have our comparison,
14:37
then they went to the header and footer, they changed the title to the balance sheet previous year comparison, and then the date up top as of December 15. That date still doesn’t seem correct to me so much because now you got you know, two dates up top, but maybe the end date would be appropriate. And then we’ve got the date information still on the left hand side so you can kind of deconstruct it You know how they did it. And if you can do that, then you have a lot more flexibility I can use what what I deconstructed here, for example, to make what we made and make it a little bit more customizable, having a whole lot more flexibility comparing month to month, quarter to quarter, or something like that a lot more flexibility with it.
15:19
Now also notes. Once you create this, if you want to keep this standard kind of report around without having to redo the whole thing. You can memorize it. We’ll talk more about memorizing reports in general in future presentations, but just realize you could memorize it. And then once it’s there, then it would be in your reports drop down and your memorized reports and you can go right to it and and work from there.