QuickBooks Online 2021. Now, report formatting basics. Let’s get into it with Intuit QuickBooks Online 2021. Here we are in our free QuickBooks Online test drive file, which you can find by searching in your favorite browser. For QuickBooks Online test drive, we’re in Craig’s design and landscaping services practice file, we’re going to practice formatting of reports and customization of reports from the basic or standard reports, we will do so with the balance sheet report. But many of these things can be done to many other types of reports as well.
00:37
So we’re going to open up a few different reports as we go. So I’m going to go down to the reports on the left hand side, we’re going to be looking into the balance sheet. So we’re going to open up the standard balance sheet report. gonna open that up, and then I’m going to duplicate the tabs, I’m going to right click on the tab up top, I’m going to duplicate the tabs. So we have our balance sheet again, I’m going to duplicate it again and open up the income statement. And then I’ll open up the trial balance just so we have those items open as well, I’m going to right click and duplicate.
01:06
And then I’m going to duplicate it one more time, I’m going to open up a trial balance to I’m going to right click and duplicate. So my goal here, one tab on the left that we can go to if we want to just check out other forms and whatnot, the balance sheet, which will be here, the main one we will be looking at, then we’ll have the income statement. And then we’ll have the trial balance. So I’m going to open those up. Now I’m going to open this up, go to the reports down below, this one’s going to be the trial balance, I’m going to type in up top to find it, trial balance, trial balance. And then I’ll change the dates up top for 2020.
01:39
And what the year of 2020. So Oh 101 to zero to 1231 to zero, we’re going to go ahead and run that report. And then I’m going to close the hamburger up top, give us some more space, scroll up just a bit holding down control. And at the one to 5% the one to five, I’m going to close the hamburger here. I’m on the second tab now. So I’m going to open the hamburger. This is the income statement that I want here, I’m going to go to the reports down below, we’re going to look at for the profit and loss P and L otherwise known as the income statement, changing the dates up top here as well to a 101 to zero to 1231 to zero, we’re going to go ahead and run that report, then I’ll close the hamburger. So now we got our profit and loss.
02:19
Here’s the main report, we’re going to be focusing in on the balance sheet. And scrolling up once again, changing the dates up top from a 101 to zero to 1231 to zero and then run that report. And then I’m going to close the hamburger up top here as well.
02:36
Now the balance sheet reports where we’re going to focus on but many, many other reports have similar kind of functionality in terms of adjusting the reports. Now remember, you can kind of think about these baseline reports like a balance sheet or income statement as your starting point from which you can do a lot of different things to so you can start to think about adjusting them having a comparative balance sheet, comparing period to period or simply format the balance sheet in different ways to give them your own style for them. The differences or the adjustments that we can make to the reports will be up here.
03:08
Some of them will be in this top ribbon area, you also have this ribbon down below that can have some adjustments, and then you have the customized range up top. So right now we’re going to go into the ones that are in the ribbon. And then we’ll go into these items up top. And then we’ll talk about the customization options in future presentations. So I’m going to go up here and start adjusting some of these items. Note as we do that, you got to run the report after each time you adjust the items. So just remember, you got to refresh the screen. So the first is the date range.
03:37
Now I use a custom date most of the time because I like to have control over how much data will be there with the custom date range, it doesn’t take me a lot of time to just enter the dates. But these are useful too. If I go then, for example, to the date today, and run this report today happens to be January 7 2021. And then you can see this date this information as of that date, the total assets you can see down here 23 436 29. If I was to change this to say this week, and then run that report, I got a little bit of a change because it went to the ninth. But if today’s the seventh, you would think there wouldn’t be much data, you know, in the future.
04:15
o I’m still at that 23 for 3629, which I think is the same number. In other words, you know, there hasn’t been a change, even though we have a different range up top. So you might say well, why, you know, why would I care what the range is? Why don’t I have just one date here on the balance sheet? What are these ranges do for me on the balance sheet, because if I change it to again, if I change to this month, let’s say and run that report, and scroll back down. Now we’re at the month we’re still at 23 436. Even though I have a different range up here.
04:46
What this range does for me on the balance sheet, it doesn’t change the report itself if the end date is basically the same or if there was no activity after the endpoint that was input. But what it does for me is that when I zoom in on it when I use that The zoom feature, then I get, I get the zoomed information according to the date range. So the zoom feature will be made a lot more efficient if you use the date range. Otherwise, if you just want to run the report doesn’t really matter what the beginning date is, it matters what the Indian date is, because that’s the date that the balance sheet will be reported as of now on the income statement, it’s different.
05:25
So all activity reports will be different. If I change the range of period, because it’s a performance report over time, it will then change how much revenue did I generate over time, that’ll that’ll have a different impact. So that’s going to be these items are going to change it back to 2020. So I’m going to go Oh, 101, to zero to 1231 to zero, and then run that report. So we’re back then to 2020. And now if I drill down on this data, if I zoom in on it, because I put the range from January to December, I have all the activity in here for the entire year, if you have a very large company that might you know, if you have a lot of data, that might be a lot of information, you might then want to limit the range for say, just December, for example.
06:07
And then just that’ll allow you to drill down on this data a lot more efficiently without having to change the range every time you do so. So that’s gonna be the ranges that we have, then the total over here. So the default for the balance sheet is to display in total. But you can display it in other ways, some of the more common ones would be by month. So what if I picked by month and ran that report, now it’s showing, as of at the end of the month. So this is a nice report that kind of it’ll show us where you stand, you know, as of as of the end of the month, this is another reason why the range up top will be helpful. Because if I change the range, if I change the range up top, say to November now 11 oh 120.
06:53
Run that report, it now has an impact showing up comparison of November and December. And that’s doing that, because I’m showing it in terms of months, and then I’ve limited the range up top. So if I just look at December 1201 to zero, and then I changed this from month to like weeks, and then run that report, then we can get a nice comparison from week to week. Now this is as of Remember, this is as of a point in time. So we’re comparing where we stand. You know, as of these these points in time, as opposed to an income statement, if you were to do a similar process, they would show you kind of the performance, income and expenses that were accumulated during those different time intervals.
07:38
So then I’m going to I’m going to bring it back. So usually the balance sheet I’m going to a normal balance sheet will be total. But you could see how we could start to generate these comparative reports using some of these functionalities. And some of the other reports that QuickBooks actually provides as as added reports are just simply customized reports that you can do yourself to just you can build them by just adjusting the settings to them to the standard report. So I’m going to run this report, bring it back to the standard balance sheet, then we have the active rows. So we can we can show the rows we have active all and non zero.
08:13
So what this means is if we’re if we’re looking at rows, so we’re looking at the rows we have here, if I was to, I don’t want to see rows if they’re not having an impact on the financial statements. So if I if I go back to the first tab, for example, and I go to my chart of accounts here, and we take a look at the chart of accounts, we have all these accounts set up, but not all of them have have items in it, some of them are zero, if I have a zero item, I don’t need it to pull over to the balance sheet as a zero, and B, because that’ll that’ll just muddy up the balance sheet, right?
08:45
So if I show it here, and I just show the active items, then it’s going to remove all the items that weren’t active. So you would think you’d have non zero, right? You’d have non zero items. That means I have nothing on here, that’s going to be a zero in it. Non active is a little bit different. If I go to if I go to active items, I could I may still have a zero in that case. So if I say I want to see active items here, I may still find something with a zero like this one. Why would I have that one there? If it’s zero? Well, if I drill down on it, then I might have detail. So it doesn’t in this case, but you might.
09:22
So you might have an item like that, like undeposited funds will typically be like that, right you’ll have undeposited funds, which is a clearing account, oftentimes will be at zero, but I want to see the detail. And if I’m jumping back and forth from data input to the balance sheet, I want to see those zero items so that I can see the detail even though it’s at zero. So if I’m reporting if I’m showing it to somebody else that I probably want to say, Get rid of all the zeros. And if I’m using it internally I want I might want to see the active items even if there is zero so I can drill down on it. For example the undeposited funds or you can choose all here
10:00
That’s gonna have all of the all of the items in it. Even the accounts that basically aren’t are not used very often. I’m not sure they all refreshed itself. So I refreshed it. And I added a test account just to show that here’s a test account with 010 in it now, so these categories, so you don’t really want these, of course showing up if there’s no activity if there’s no activity in the account at all. So typically, so that’s why normally, you’re going to say I want to see the active accounts, if you’re using it.
10:26
Or if you’re if you’re giving it to someone else, you’re probably going to say nonzero accounts, the show columns will behave in a similar fashion, but we don’t have any columns right now. So it’s not gonna be that useful for us. So we’ll go to the next item here, we have these the Select period. Now, this is a great tool, because it’ll allow you to do comparisons from period to period and also percentage calculations. As well, we’ll do this in more detail, when we actually just build a report, specifically comparing period to period.
10:53
Some of the custom reports that are already made for you by Intuit by QuickBooks are actually just basically using a standard report that they’re that they’re then changing for you. And then making it a standardized report, you can do similar things by simply customizing your report, memorizing it and saving it in that way as well. Some of these comparisons are similar to what we saw when we like compared the months in this way, but it’s a little bit different. So it was a little bit more tricky. It’s useful for us to use these instead of the custom date range.
11:22
So I might pick a pick a date range up top. So I might say that I want to take a look at this month, for example, and then say run that report. So now it’s defined as of this month. And then if I go to this select period, and I say I want to compare it to the previous period, then I’ll compare it to the previous period. And then I can run that report. And so now we’ve got this comparison, it’s a little bit different than what we did before here.
11:46
Because one it has it has the current month first, which is often a formatting that people like, it’s a little weird, because you first would think that the oldest month would be first going from left to right in the newer month on the right. But compared by most important data, then it would make sense to have the newest month first. The other thing that’s really useful, and the thing that’s different than than doing it this way with the months column is that we can then do our percentage change, then you can say, Okay, I want to see the percentage change between these two periods. So if I just have two periods, then I can subtract the two columns here, obviously. And we could just run that report.
12:25
And so now we’ve got now we’ve got the change between the between the two periods, there is no change here. Because there wasn’t much activity in the following period, it looks like but you know, you got that change. And we’ll take a deeper look at that when we get to when we get to creating reports in the future. But then you also have, if I go up top, we have the percentage change that I could pick up the percentage change, and we can run that report. And we have the percentage change. Now this gives you that percentage change, which again isn’t very interesting at the report date range I ran here. But the percentage date range change can give you a lot of information when you do comparisons, like with other companies.
13:04
So if I hit the drop down again, you could do a similar kind of thing for the previous year. If you’re comparing year to year percentage of row percentage of columns, we might take a look at that in the future. But you got that functionality there, I’m going to remove it for now. Take it back to where we were. So let’s run this report. And then I’m going to take the date range back to a 101 to zero to 1231. to zero, I’m going to run that report, then we have the cash versus accrual.
13:33
Now many people kind of they see their system possibly has a cash basis. And they’ll want to toggle over to a cash basis all the time. You know, I wouldn’t recommend doing that I wouldn’t recommend changing your settings to a cash basis, even if functionally you run kind of on a cash basis. So talk to your accountant, if you’re kind of thinking that you want to go over to the cash basis, I would think in most cases, it would not be something you’d want to do.
13:57
Let me just try to explain that real quick. If I go to like the desktop version, just to look at this flowchart here. I noticed that even if you’re using like the bank, the bank in order to record the transactions, like using bank feeds, like say you have gig work, and you’re just recording your books basically on the bank, then when you receive the money, say from like Amazon or say you receive it from from some kind of App Store or something, then you’re just deposit in it and you’re recording it as revenue, which is basically a cash basis method.
14:30
But you don’t need to change your accounting system to be cash basis. Because an accrual basis would record the same thing, meaning you’re still using an accrual basis, it just happens that the type of transaction you’re recording has the same result under both a cash basis and accrual basis system. So you’ll end up with the same result in that case, whether you put it on a cash basis or an accrual basis anyways, so you don’t really need to change it if you keep it on an accrual basis. Then when you do something that’s necessary for an accrual basis, such as enter an invoice and have accounts receivable, enter a bill have accounts payable that will be involved.
15:10
And even like putting machinery and equipment on the books is really kind of an accrual type of thing. It will then be there, and then you won’t have the non accrual things. Because your system is simply not non accrual, you don’t need to toggle to a cash basis in order to enter the data, basically, in a way that would is basically a cash basis. And the same recording would happen either way. In other words, like if I if I made a sale here, of let’s say, a food truck made sale, they gave the food at the same point in time and got paid at the same point in time, both the cash method and the accrual method would record the same thing for two different reasons.
15:48
The cash method would record revenue at that point, because cash was received, the accrual method would still record the revenue at that point because the work was done. And so you did end up in the same place. So I would think that most of the time you want to keep it here, but you can you can toggle back and forth and, and take a look at it. And then we have the collapse column. If we run down here, we can collapse the columns.
16:11
Now notice what happens is you might say, well, all these triangles, I would expect them to be collapsed if I do that, but it’s only collapsing the ones that are the sub accounts, the ones that you make, if I go back over here, and if I made a sub account, the ones that are indented a collapses, the triangles that are there, because they’re by category, or by account type are not are not collapsing, you can create other reports that like a simplified balance sheet that has less information. But the things are collapsing like like the truck down here. If you put your eye on that truck, and I expand it again, then you can see down here you got now this is collapsing and expand because that’s a subcategory.
16:51
The other ones didn’t collapse for that, if you want a more crunched up or simplified balance sheet, you can run another report, which is the balance sheet, that’s going to be a simplified balance sheet, which will scrunch up some of these columns, right. And then we’ve got this sort, this is the default, you’d probably want on the default most of the time, but you might want descending order and what will happen here, hopefully, it’ll keep the categories the same because I don’t want the balance sheet, you know, changing category by the total amounts. But like for example, down down here, you’ve got this category of, of these three items, you might want the the largest one on top within the other current liabilities category.
17:33
So you might be able to do that up top by using this sort feature, and say I want descending order. And then if I if I go down here, so now I got the loan on top. So that’s kind of useful. You can do, you can do more. This is formatting with account numbers, like within this particular group, it’ll sort them by alphabetical order by default. But you can use this as this ascending and descending to help. And you can also use account numbers. To further adjust that, I’m going to bring it back, I’m going to bring it back up to the norm. The default settings will say default, and then you can add notes here.
18:15
So you can add notes at the bottom. So you got that option. And then you can edit title. Now this is pretty neat as well, because some of these titles aren’t as standardized for financial accounting. So these ones assets, you probably don’t want to change that. But bank accounts like you might just want to call these cash cash accounts if you’re going to use it for reporting purposes to external users. QuickBooks calls them bank accounts, because again, that’s kind of an internal help.
18:41
Because that says hey, these are the accounts that you can use bank feeds on accounts receivable, other current assets, fixed assets might be called you might prefer to call it property, plant and equipment or depreciable assets if you’re giving it to somebody else who, like a finance, like financial accounting might be more comfortable with that term. You have to use fixed assets when you set up the account type, because that’s what QuickBooks used for the term to set up the account type other assets liabilities liabilities, accounts payable, credit cards, other current liabilities long term equity.
19:17
Now this if you’re a not for profit organization or something like that, you can then change the name of equity, which could be useful because that’s one of the problems with a not for profit organization that terminology is going to be different. If you’re a sole proprietorship you might call it owner’s equity, if you’re a partnership, you might call it partnership equity. So and then retained earnings if it’s if it’s a sole proprietorships you might call it to owner’s equity here right and I could if I save that, then we might be able to change some of these some of these headers now it said it said that it’s going to take a while to save it.
19:56
So that’s that’s I haven’t used that much in the past. But for reporting purposes, that could be a neat feature. It’s not It’s not an automatic, it’s taken a little bit of time for it to adjust that. But I would take a look at that we might take a look at that more, when we start to when we start to memorize our reports and make custom reports, then we can email our reports here, we can print our reports here, we can then export to Excel, which we’ll do we’ll practice that these also are great tools to export them to excel.
20:28
And once they’re in Excel, we can then use them as a baseline to do whatever else we need to do with them within Excel as well. And then we got the display in compact form, or you can, you know, uncompacted the form here. So those are going to be our general settings and then we’ll get into more detail on the Customize settings in future presentations. I just want to point out one more thing before you can also edit the title down here. You could do it in another location I think as well. But if you need to edit the title right there, you can actually do it with that with that pen or pencil or marker