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Modifying QuickBooks Reports Gives You Better Insight Into Past, Future: Part 1

December 13, 2023 By Leave a Comment

If you make one resolution about improving your accounting procedures in 2013, it should be this: Make extensive use of the tools that QuickBooks offers for report modification. Comprehensive, meticulously-shaped reports that flow out of your carefully-constructed records and transactions are your reward for pounding on the keys every day, conscientiously recording income and expenses.

QuickBooks supplies you with a wide variety of pre-formatted reports whose modification options can help you do focused, critical analysis of your financial data. The right set of numbers will help you understand your history and plan for the future more effectively.

Note: The reports discussed and pictured here shows only one possible set of customization options. There are many variations. We can answer your questions.

Check your preferences

When you created your company file in QuickBooks, you chose between reporting on a cash (income and expenses are recorded when money changes hands) or accrual (recorded when you invoice or receive a bill) basis. This affects summary reports, but not those that break out individual transactions or are simply lists.

If you want to change this, click Edit | Preferences | Reports & Graphs | Company Preferences and click the desired button:


Figure 1: You can establish a preference for your summary reports’ basis here.

You can set other preferences in this window that will affect your report output here, too, as you can see.

Altering the display

Open the Income by Customer Summary report (Reports | Company & Financial). Change the dates to reflect a range you’d like to see. Want the data displayed by different time increments – like week or quarter – instead of just the total? Click the arrow next to Columns and select Four week.


Figure 2: You can do some report display alterations from this toolbar; the options it offers vary by report.

By default, your report rows display alphabetically. If you want to view a column by total in ascending or descending order, select the column by hovering over the top number until the magnifying glass appears, and click on it. Click the arrow next to Sort by and choose Total, then click the AZ [down arrow] icon (in some reports, there will be other options here).

Additional options in this toolbar let you:
• Memorize the report
• Print, email or export it to Excel
• Hide or Show the Header
• Collapse or Expand the columns
• Refresh the report if you’ve made changes that will alter data

More display options

Click Customize Report to open this window:

 

Figure 3: This window outlines your report’s content options.

Some of the options here duplicate what you saw in the toolbar. In addition, you can switch between Accrual and Cash for just this report, and add subcolumns in some. The latter is a complicated operation, one that you must understand well in order to glean any insight from it. We can help you with this.

Sometimes the subcolumns are generic, as shown in the screen above. In other reports, they’re very specific to that group of data.

Clicking on Revert takes you back to the default format, and Advanced opens additional options specific to the current report.

More customization = more insightful results = more informed financial choices

Transaction reports have many similarities and two major differences: You can change the column order by hovering your cursor over the column label until a hand appears. Click, hold and drag the column to the desired spot and let go. You can also add or delete columns by clicking Customize Report and checking or unchecking labels.


Figure 4: In transaction – or detail – reports, you can alter the column structure.

Learn the mechanics of report display modification well, and your company’s finances will come into much sharper focus, improving the wisdom of future choices. Up next month: filtering your reports for additional clarity.

If you have questions on this or any other QuickBooks feature, call or email us. We’re your partner and we’re here to make your business better.

 

Filed Under: Balance Sheet Analysis, Basic Bookkeeping, Blog, Business Balance Sheet, Intuit QuickBooks, Modifying QuickBooks, QuickBooks Reports

QuickBooks 2013 Gives You A Reason To Upgrade

December 13, 2023 By Leave a Comment

Tired of QuickBooks’ cramped, claustrophobic screens and uneven interface? You’ll be pleased to see the 2013 version.
You chose QuickBooks for a variety of reasons, a major one being its simplicity and usability.
But the software is more than 20 years old now, and hundreds of features have been added over the years. QuickBooks looks old, tired and in need of a makeover.
Not anymore. Intuit has totally redesigned the program’s interface and navigational tools, providing a more consistent, streamlined, state-of-the-art look and feel. For the first time in a few years, there’s a compelling reason to consider moving up.

Figure 1: The QuickBooks 2013 home page.
Clean, Efficient, Customizable
What Intuit heard from customers was that they wanted a clean, simple experience. They wanted QuickBooks optimized for efficiency, and they wanted to be able to customize quickly.

So Intuit built a brand new interface, one that offers:
• An across-the-board, consistent look and feel
• A minimal learning curve, aided by familiar software conventions
• A clearer, more obvious workflow.
QuickBooks’ 2013′s dramatic changes are evident from its first screen. The home page has been cleaned up, and many icons removed (with their functions available elsewhere). But the interactive flowchart graphic is still there, along with icons for other commonly-used features.
You can still use the software’s standard drop-down menus. But you now have a choice between the old horizontal Icon Toolbar and a new vertical navigational panel (or neither of the latter two). You can customize the new panel to give you quick access to the functions and reports you use most often, saving time and unnecessary clicking.

Figure 2: The new vertical navigational panel can be customized to display the icons you want.
Familiarity, and Clear Signals
Whether you just handle a subset of your company’s financial data or you’re the only one working with QuickBooks, your workflow will be faster and more intuitive.
QuickBooks 2013 uses colors and other visual cues to provide helpful hints and speed up your work. If the same option occurs within more than one screen, it’s always the identical color. When you’re completing an invoice, for example, the Save & New button is a bright blue color, as it is on many other screens. The Save & Close and OK icons are the same shade within the forms and records where they occur.
Color is also used to signify related actions in the new navigational Ribbon, a familiar interface convention that replaces the mismatched icons that used to be displayed at the top of transaction forms. In QuickBooks 2013, the icons for related tasks are the same color, and the graphics themselves are much cleaner and well-positioned.


Figure 3: QuickBooks 2013′s new navigational Ribbon is designed to accelerate workflow.
A Pleasure to Use
No area of QuickBooks remained untouched in this massive overhaul. Every screen has been modified to enhance readability and speed. Fonts look larger and clearer, and the overall design is more aesthetically pleasing.
So besides making your accounting chores zip along faster, the new look and navigation have a positive psychological effect: It’s simply more enjoyable and less frustrating to interact with QuickBooks 2013. Its more modern, attractive look has a lot of appeal.
There are a few new things under the hood in this new version – it’s not just an interface update. For example, customer and vendor records are more flexible and thorough. You can attach to-do’s to them, assign multiple contacts and store more contact options, like Facebook addresses and Twitter handles.

Figure 4: Contact records in QuickBooks 2013 are more readable and thorough.
Starting Fresh
There are other changes that will make your work life easier, like one-click access to both the Intuit App Center (where you’ll find hundreds of integrated QuickBooks add-ons) and your most often-accessed reports.
The last few versions of QuickBooks have been rather ho-hum in terms of new usability and functionality. But we encourage you to seriously consider upgrading to QuickBooks 2013. We’d be happy to help you get up and running with it. Together, we can take a fresh look at your workflow to see if you and QuickBooks can build a better accounting experience.

 

Filed Under: Basic Bookkeeping, Blog, Intuit QuickBooks, QuickBooks Premier, QuickBooks Software, Small Business Accounting Software, Small Business Bookkeeping, Upgrade Accounting Software

QuickBooks Payroll Runs: Easy, Fast, Accurate

August 15, 2024 By Leave a Comment

If you’ve already set up your QuickBooks employee and company payroll files, the hard part’s over.
It’s not just a catchy ad slogan: It’s true. Unless you have dozens of employees or numerous exceptions each payday, you can literally process a payroll run in just a few minutes using the employee compensation tools in QuickBooks.
No matter which version of desktop QuickBooks you’re using, payday chores are similar. Even if you’ve subscribed to Full Service Payroll and are having most of the work done by Intuit, you still have to enter the number and type of hours worked for each pay period.
If you’re doing payroll manually or through a payroll service, you might be surprised at how quickly and easily your payroll tasks can be completed once you’ve finished entering information about your company and its employees, taxes and deductions.
A Simple Process
When you get a reminder that it’s time to run payroll, go to Employees | Pay Employees and choose Scheduled Payroll to get to this window:

 

Figure 1: No matter how many payrolls you’ve run, it’s important to verify that these dates are correct.

When you click Start Scheduled Payroll, a new screen displays your employee list in a spreadsheet grid. By default, QuickBooks displays several columns, including Employee, Regular Pay and Sick Hourly; you can opt to include others, like Employee Number. If you hide columns that contain information, that data will still be used in paycheck calculation. Then:
• Verify that the information at the top of the screen is correct (Payroll Schedule, Bank Account, etc.).
• Make sure that all employees to be paid have check marks next to their names.
• Enter the number of hours worked for each hourly employee, placing them in the correct pay type column.
Select one and click Open Paycheck Detail to see a complete breakdown of compensation and withholding — all calculated automatically by QuickBooks based on your setup data — within the Preview Paycheck screen. Close the window when finished.

 

Figure 2: The Preview Paycheck screen shows the numbers behind the check amount.
Checking Your Work
If you’re satisfied that everything is correct, click Continue. In the next screen, you’ll verify Payroll Information again and check a box to indicate whether checks will be printed or handwritten (you can assign a starting check number to the latter). QuickBooks displays a grid containing each employee’s total gross pay, total taxes and deductions, net pay, employer taxes, contributions and total hours. The Direct Deposit field will be checked if the individual is signed up.
If you’re at all unsure that your payroll information is correct, you can click Finish Later. Otherwise, select Create Paychecks.
The Final Step
QuickBooks will then display your results:

 

Figure 3: Once you’ve previewed and approved a payroll, you can simply click to print any paper checks and pay stubs.
Check the box at the bottom of this window next to Do not advance the dates of this payroll schedule in the Payroll Center if you still have employees to process for this run. If the box isn’t checked, QuickBooks will change the dates in the Pay Employees window to reflect your next pay period.
When you select Print Paychecks or Print Pay Stubs, the selection window opens. You can toggle among views of Paychecks, Direct Deposit or Both. Select the ones you want to dispatch and click Print or E-Mail. You’ll have the option to reprint any checks if you need to; otherwise, click OK.

 

Figure 4: Click Preferences in the print selection window to customize paycheck vouchers and pay stubs.
No Room for Errors
Sounds simple, and it is – as long as your setup was error-free. As you well know, you can’t make mistakes running payroll or you’ll initiate a whole series of incorrect numbers, making employees, benefits providers and government agencies unhappy.
So do not proceed if something doesn’t look right; QuickBooks always gives you an out. And let us know how we can help with setup, taxes or payroll runs – or anything in between.

Filed Under: Basic Bookkeeping, Blog, Boost Productivity, Intuit Payroll, Intuit QuickBooks, Online Payroll Service, Outsourcing Bookkeeping, Outsourcing Payroll, Payroll Accounting, Payroll Processing, QuickBooks Reports, Small Business Bookkeeping