QuickBooks Pro Plus desktop 2022 report formatting basics, 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 the view drop down the open windows list on the left hand side company dropped down looking at the home page in the middle maximize in that home page, we’re focusing in on the balance sheet customization of it to get to the balance sheet, we can go to the reports drop down a couple of ways we can get there, we have been doing so by going to the reports, or company and financial then down to the drop down standard balance sheet.
00:43
It can also get there by going to the reports center as we saw in a previous presentation. And if you saved it as a favorite report, you might have it in your favorite reports right there as well. We’re going to go down to the company and financial and on down to that balance sheet standard going into it in this format. I’m going to make the font 14, we are going to focus on formatting. So I’ll show you how we do that we’re going to go to the customized reports up top, we’re going to the fonts and numbers tab. We’ll focus more on it in a future presentation.
01:13
But for now, we’re changing the font size go into the font size, bringing this up to 1414 on the font. Okay, yes, please for all the fonts. And okay, down below, we’ve maximized the font size, closing up the icon in the left hand side so we can focus in on this balance sheet. Now remember that the balance sheet and the income statement are the major two large reports. But for QuickBooks, they’re still classified as reports. So we can use them in essence as a starting component and do some customizations to those reports. So that’s what we’ll do. Now, we’ll do it to the balance sheet or do some of the customizations with regard to the balance sheet.
01:55
Notice that the same kinds of customizations may be applicable to other types of reports. However, when you’re thinking about the formatting of reports, you want to get an idea as to whether you’re talking about a point in time type of report or a timing type of reports. The balance sheet, as we’ve seen in the past is a point in time type of report, it’s showing us where we stand at a certain point. Therefore, we can represent the balance sheet with just this one date. As of this point in time, income statement reports will have then timeframes a beginning and an end.
02:28
And they’re going to see activity over a range of time. So the things that you’re going to do for customizations, you might start to kind of kind of see what they’re going to be in general, as to whether it’s going to be a point in time type of reports, or a range type of report. So there’s going to be a whole lot of options, we’re going to go through like the basic options that are upfront here. And then we’ll go through some of the other tabs in future presentations. So we got some of our formatting just up in this ribbon up top. And then we have more customization of it in this customized report item. As we have seen, we’ll go into that in more detail in future presentations. So let’s just go through the ribbon up top,
03:07
we can see similar information. For other reports, we got the customized reports. We’ll talk about that in more detail later. Now we’re going to go to the the comment on a report. This is a really nice feature if you’re trying to share the report or comment on it for somebody else, and you wanted to print out those comments. So you could select this item, it opens up, in essence, another report, and it gives you these little comment fields on the right hand side. And so you could say okay, if I have a question about that accounts, receivable testing question, and you put a little comment there, and it’ll reference to it with a comment down below.
03:43
So I could put a comment number two, test two. And we could save that comment as as that. And then I could save this report, if I so choose, for example saving it, I’m going to save balance sheet comments, too, and save it and then say okay, and those comments then will show up, I can close this back out. And I can go to the reports drop down and I can look at the commented reports. And this gives us a list of those reports that we had the comments on here’s the one we just commented on.
04:17
So then you can kind of print that out and give that information possibly to somebody if you want to mark up the report, which is nice. Closing that up closing this up taking us back to the standard balance sheet, the share template, this is something that if you were to change your template for your balance sheet and you wanted to share it say with Intuit that wanted to share it with other people then meaning you made a customization to the report that you think would be significant for others to look at. Then then you could save that changed for other people not saving your numbers, but saving the typical that formatting of the report.
04:52
So I’m going to close that out. Most people probably won’t be sharing the template unless you make something really nice. We’re going to go through the memorize report. worth later. If you do some of this formatting information, then you might want to memorize the reports. And when you memorize the report, they’ll go into that memorized report list. In other words, if you go to the drop down, memorize reports, you’ll have some categories of the memorized reports here, then when you open them up, you won’t have to go through the process of customizing them. Again, we’ll talk about those in future presentations.
05:24
Then we’ve got the print options here. So we can print the report to a printer, we can save it as a PDF, as well. Note that most of the reports have this option to save as a PDF. But I would also recommend having a PDF printer option one is called the cute PDF printer that allows you to print the report and then print it to a PDF printer, which basically saves it as a PDF. And that way, if you run into any kind of thing in any kind of program that allows you to print, but you can’t save it as a PDF, you can print it to a PDF, and that is quite useful.
06:03
We’ll use that tool in future presentations, you’ve got the emailing tool, if you got your email kind of connected here, then you can send the report as Excel report or as a PDF format. Typically, most likely it would be as a PDF type of format. But you could send out the report by email, we’ve got the Excel information, we’ll we’ll be using this in future presentations a lot. So I won’t go into it in detail now. But you can export this information to excel, which is a great tool, because oftentimes, you’re using this financial data as a starting point to think about some other kinds of reports that you might want to do.
06:41
And or if you can’t do some of the formatting here in QuickBooks, you might be able to export it to Excel and do some of the formatting there. And you can also put all these reports on one worksheet. And that can allow you to help you to basically print out your information in one PDF file, possibly, instead of having multiple PDF files, when you’re sending multiple reports to somebody. We’ll talk about all that in future presentations as we as we go forward to that. And then we’ve got the hide the header up top, so you can hide the header, which is nice, because you know what the report is on the left hand side. So we’ve got the report open.
07:19
Therefore, if you’re actually in the report, it could save some space if you hide the header. And then you can scroll through the report and not have that that header there as a problem. I’m going to bring it back show in the header, you can collapse the rows. So if I collapse the rows, you can see some of the rows collapsed. You’ll know you might be saying Why doesn’t it collapse, like all these triangles, when I collapse it, it’s because it’s only collapsing the the sub accounts that basically we made. So I believe, for example, these accounts down here, these are sub accounts that we made. So if I collapse them, it’ll basically remove those those sub accounts now into the payroll.
07:58
So this one triangle collapsed. And that’s because it’s a sub account. So in other words, if I go open up the item on the left, and I go to lists, and I go down to the chart of accounts, the sub accounts are these items that we made them subsidiary, so we did it, instead of the triangles that are created from the account types, the account types are not collapsing, the sub accounts that we are putting together are the ones that are collapsing back to the balance sheet, closing up the item on the left hand side. So then we’ve got the collapsing that we looked at, expand rows,
08:36
let’s expand them, and then we could refresh every time you enter new data, then you may want to double check with the refreshing or if I change the date, for example, you can you can change and refresh. So for example, if I change this to 1231 to three, then you can hit the refresh button. But oftentimes you don’t need to because if you just tab over or you click on the actual form, then it’ll refresh automatically. So I think this refresh button is kind of redundant. It’s been there for a long time, you used to have to click it every time. So I think it’s still kind of there.
09:09
But at this point in time, generally, if you have the option set up to do so it will generally update automatically. If you click on the report, I think that’s the easiest default, typically to have. And then we’ve got the custom items down below. So these are going to be the the years or date ranges that that we can pick up. So we’ve got all we’ve got today, we’ve got this week, and then this month, so
09:32
So most likely for and by the way on the balance sheet, when you’re looking at the date ranges, you really only have one date right here 1231 23 Because it’s as of a point in time, that’s the only date you need to create the balance sheet. But you might want to range because when you drill down on the data such as the checking account, it’s gonna check an account, then it’s going to give you the detail and if I only have one date up top, then it’s not going to give me the range. of data unless I go in here and say, Oh 10123, and then it gives me the data in here.
10:06
So I would like to when I drill down on the data to have the range, because when I’m on the balance sheet, I’m at a point in time type of report not needing a range. But when I zoom on to the transaction by detail from it, then I need the range because now I’m in a timing type of report that has a beginning and an end for it to do what it needs to do.
10:26
So if I close this out, then if I was to add the range, you could do so up top by customizing the range and setting it up here from a 101 to three, and then say, OK, and that will give me a range does not have any impact on the balance sheet, this number is the same. But when I double click on it, then we’ve got that range here. If I close this out, once again, note that the beginning number doesn’t have any effect on this, like 36 194. For example, if I double click on this, and change this to 1230 123 1230 123 to 1230 123.
11:03
And okay, same number here, the only difference is that when I drill down on this, then I don’t have any data on the transaction detail. And if I close this out, that will not be the same with the income statement. Because the income statement is a range type of report, it needs a beginning and an end, the numbers on the actual statement will differ, depending on the range that you put in place. Once you have a range, then you can hit these drop downs on the reports. So you have this fist all today, this week, this month, right in those common kind of ranges you might take a look at. And then you could say look at the last you can say this fiscal year, and then you could start looking at last year, last week, and so on, on the ranges.
11:46
So if these ranges are applicable, then of course, you can just simply select these ranges, and it’ll it’ll give you what you need. If they are not applicable, and you have some kind of custom range, then you can go to the custom range, I often go into the custom range just kind of by default, so that I can so that I can define it. But if you’re working in real time, it’ll usually give you the information to date. In other words, if I open this up, as of today, this ending date would normally be as of today. And the beginning date would be as of the beginning of the year, typically.
12:18
So if I drill down on the data, it’ll give me the range from the beginning of the year to date. Generally, that’s the general layout. And that’s often what’s in what you’re going to want. The as update will, of course, be the as of date of the of the ending point here. And so you can customize that show the columns. So usually it’s on showing the total only. And then you can change these showing, you know, the showing of the columns to change these items, then you also have to see the date range, because now you kind of changing the range as well.
12:51
So for example, if I went down here and say I want to see months, for example, then I need I need a range, a beginning point for that to happen. So I’d go into the customize reports and say I have to change this back to the beginning. So if I put this on, oh 10123 and say, okay, then it’s going to give me the month. So there’s January, February, March. Now note that this report is as of a point in time. So it’s telling me where we stand as of the end of January, as of the end of February, and so on. And then that’s going to be that general information, we could do the same thing for the days, the week, the two weeks,
13:29
and then the quarter would be another typical way we might want to see there’s so now we have basically where we stand for the four quarters. Now you might be saying is there a way that I can do a comparison between last year versus year this year last year to date for versus this year to date, and that kind of reports, we can do that too. We’ll talk about that later when we go to the customizing of the reports. But notice here, you have to that combination to make this work properly. The combination between the range the proper range, in this case, the entire year that we selected, and then the quarters, which will break out that year into the four quarters.
14:06
So you have to have the range set up properly in order to get the proper number of quarters that might be a applicable. And then if I bring this back to the total, let’s bring it back to the total again. So there are our totals, then you’ve got your sorting options, these aren’t as applicable as you would think. Note that because well let’s talk about it here we’ll have the default sorting is going to be that it’s an order as we saw in prior presentation by the account types, meaning assets, liabilities, and then more specifically with the checking account, the accounts receivable, the other current assets and so on and so forth. That’s going to be the altering of it.
14:44
But within those accounts, then it’s going to be ordered in this case by account number or in other words, you can think about it in essence in alphabetical order. But if you were to add account numbers then you have the control to order it within the account the within the account. label here. So this one has a sub category. And within the sub category, the number is what’s driving it.
15:06
So that’s that’s going to be more useful. If you have the account numbers, you can do that if you don’t have account numbers, then what’s going to happen is within this subcategory, it would be an order by alphabetical order within the subcategories. So at first is an order by type, and then by the subcategory if you have account numbers, but if not, then in alphabetical order within the subcategory. So in other words, if you didn’t have the account numbers, this this EMP item would possibly be up top first item, which possibly was not the one you would want there, because it’s the smallest one probably most likely the least significant to you. But that’s how it would work.
15:44
If you don’t have account numbers, by default, you don’t have account numbers, because account numbers can be somewhat tedious to be adding, we do have another section, I believe that will talk about just account numbers in general. So then you could go up top and say, Okay, well, what if I change the defaults here and go to totals, and then I want to sort it not from the smallest to the biggest, but from the biggest to the smallest. So I’m going to sort from Z to A.
16:09
And what happens here is it sorts within the whole category of assets, so that you get the largest asset on down. So instead of starting with cash, it starts with with the largest asset of accounts receivable, and then on down, so that’s not really useful to you, it might help you a little bit to see what your largest asset category is, and so on, it would be more relevant to me, it would make more sense if they put the largest to smallest buy type in here, so that it would rearrange by the largest item by type inside. But it doesn’t do that. Therefore, this doesn’t seem to be that useful of a feature, even if you’re not using account numbers to me.
16:46
So I would keep it generally on the default, then, of course, and have your default calculation there, then we’ve got the report basis accrual and the cash basis. A lot of people you know, have questions about this are always asking, you know, should I put on the cash basis, I do more of a cash basis thing, I’d like to make it easy, I want to do the cash basis. And notice, I would not put it on the cash basis unless you talk to your accountant. And they say that you should. Because note that the difference between an accrual basis and a cash basis is not dependent solely on whether or not you check off the accrual or cash basis, it’s going to be dependent on your flow of activity, depending on the actual type of industry that you are in.
17:29
So in other words, if you’re in an industry where you need to track the accounts receivable, then you’re going to be on more of an accrual basis just by the fact that you’re entering something as an invoice to build them. And you have to track the accounts receivable. If you’re in an industry where you don’t have to do that if you’re doing like gig work or something like that.
17:48
And you’re just getting paid. And you want to just record it when you get Cait get paid. And you’re saying I don’t need accounts receivable, therefore I’m going to put it on an accrual basis or a cash basis from an accrual basis. You don’t need to do that generally, because you’re not going to enter anything to accounts receivable. In other words, if I make this larger and go back to the homepage,
18:09
if you’re just using like the bank statement, using bank feeds to create your accounts, you’re not going to be using an invoice, you’re not even going to be using possibly a sales receipt, if you’re just using bank feeds or receive payment, you’re just going to be making deposits from the bank feeds that cleared the bank and posting that to the income statement. So you don’t need to change it from an accrual basis to a cash basis to do that to change it. Because because the way that you’re doing the data input is on a cash basis, not an accrual basis.
18:38
So that so I would keep it there by default in the event that you needed to deviate from basically a cash basis to an accrual basis in some way, you have the capacity to do that. So then you might say, well, when would I use it? You know, when would I use this? You could use it, if I close this back out, you could use this item to kind of see you know what your cash flow would be, if you were if you’re going from an accrual basis to a cash basis, although you also have the statement of cash flows to help you out with that. Let’s just get an idea. If I was to move over to this item here to the cash basis and say refresh it, you can see the accounts receivable has changed substantially.
19:14
And if I go back to the accrual basis, for example, is that the 1037 82 and if I go to the cash basis, it’s at then cash basis, the 16 306. Now you might be saying well, why doesn’t it go down to zero if the accounts receivable is going to be an accrual type of account, it should go down to zero. And it’s because it’s got to track the inventory. So the inventory is kind of throwing it off when you toggle from an accrual to a cash basis. If you were in a service company, like a bookkeeping company or law firm that was on an accrual basis and you’re toggled over to a cash basis this accounts receivable should in essence, Go away Go down to zero,
19:50
same kind of concept down here with the accounts payable. It should be substantially different if you’re going to be toggling from an accrual basis to the cash basis. Just a quick recap on why that might be if I go back on over to my homepage? And the reason I want to adjust this because this this question actually comes up a lot with people saying, hey, I want to have a more simplified system, I want to use a cash basis, I want to talk a little bit to the cash basis. And but you really got to think about what’s the underlying flow of the data that you’re going to input.
20:19
So in other words, again, if you’re on a cash basis, you’re probably going to be doing the data input to be in alignment with a cash basis, whether you click the accrual button or not, by entering the data bit into the bank feeds, if you have to track accounts receivable, then you have to be on an accrual basis. What happens if you enter something for accounts receivable, and then you toggle it over to a cash basis, what’s gonna, what’s gonna happen? Well, in general, if you had just like a service type of business, when you hit the invoice,
20:46
that increases the accounts receivable, and the other side goes to sales, meaning you record revenue at this point in time, typically, on an accrual basis, because you’re invoicing closer to the point of time you did the work typically. So that’s when they record revenue. And then when you when you receive the payment, there’s no income being reported, what happens there, then you’re decreasing the accounts receivable the other side, then go into the cash account undeposited funds or directly into the checking account.
21:14
So if you were to click it over to a cash basis, and you use invoices, then you would think then it’s going to basically not going to record the revenue until this point in time when you hit the receive payment item, because that’s the point in time that you got the paid the cash and when it should record the revenue on a cash basis system. So if you understand that kind of difference, and you want to see a report that’s going to be showing on that basis, then you might you might then use this report. But you can also get some of that data from using the Cash Flow Report as well. So that’s the general idea for the cash and accrual. So bottom line,
21:53
I would keep it on an accrual. Even if you’re using a cash basis, and derive whether or not you’re using a cash or accrual basis based on your data input formatting, not on these these two items up top. So I’m going to close that back out. And so there we have that now if you have any filters in place, this is a quick thing to kind of show you the filters that would be in place. We’ll talk more about filters in future presentations. So notice a lot of the stuff and these ribbons are going to be redundant if you go to the Customize area.
22:23
So if I go to the Customize reports, which we’ll talk more about in future presentations, this first tab, the Display tab is a lot of its redundant, right, so you got this dates here, you got the drop down dates here. But then here you’ve got that first customized date, which is up in the Customize area, which is nice. So you often have to go into here to get to that if you need it. You’ve got the accrual versus cash, which we looked at, which is once again, redundant.
22:48
And then we’ve got the display columns on the totals which is right there. So that’s redundant as well. And then you’ve got the formatting sort by formatting here, which is in essence up top. This items down below have to do with our comparative reports. Those get a little bit more tricky. We’ll make comparative reports in future presentations. We’ll also talk about some of these other sorting options or formatting options in future presentations.