How to Create Reports in QuickBooks 2019 – Part 1

Watch the QuickBooks 2019 video tutorial below.  We will discuss and start creating reports and show you how to navigate in the report center. We will also demonstrate how to generate reports under company & financial category, specifically running profit and loss reports.

Welcome back! We are working in module eleven. In this module, we’re talking about reports.

We’ve already looked at the Quick Reports that QuickBooks has. I really want to dive now into all the reporting features that are available in QuickBooks.

This will be part one. There is a part two to this so make sure you watch both parts so you can see all there is to know about working with reports.

There are a couple of different ways to look at the reports in QuickBooks. One is to go to Reports on the menu and another way would be to use the Reports option right here on your icon bar to get to what we call the Report Center.

You can get to the same reports either way. It’s just a matter of preference, which way you’d like to use them. But, let me show you how they correlate.

From here down, you’re going to see different categories of reports. You’ll see when you point to a particular category that these are the reports in that category.

These categories are the exact same categories that you see over here. You’ll see there’s Company & Financial, Customers & Receivables, and you’ll see those here.

If I wanted to get to the reports over this way, then, I click over here on Company & Financial and these are the reports that I would have seen on the dropdown over there.

A couple things you can do with reports if you’re in the Report Center. When you’re looking at a report and you want to run it all. All you have to do is click Run right here to display the report.

If you wanted to display certain dates on the report, then you can use the Dates option right here, where you have a dropdown you can pick from, or you can choose the From and the To options and actually put in the dates you’d like to choose.

You can also mark a report as your fav. If you click on Fav, for example, that’s a report you want to run on a regular basis and you would actually find those reports under your Favorites tab right here. You’ll see the Profit & Loss we were just looking at.

The next thing I want to show you is you have a Memorize tab. These are the reports that you’ve already memorized in QuickBooks. Memorized reports are ones you’ve saved and you want to be able to pull them up quickly in the future.

We’re actually going to look at some memorized reports over in section four. You have been familiar with favorites already and recent.

Recent are the reports you’ve recently run in case you wanted to go back to one it’s there just for easy reference.

The last tab says, Contributed. Intuit users have the ability to edit different reports and actually share them with the Intuit community. You can see if you look at these, a lot of these were created by Intuit. But, when you scroll down the list, you’ll see several that were created by other users.

You’ll see, for example, when you come down here, you’ve got one by who knows who this one is. Here’s one from Rory. You can see for each one of these the popularity.

It’ll show how many downloads and the average ratings. If there have been any reviews for these you can come up and read them. Like this one has some reviews.

Let’s go through the menu. Just look at some of these reports so you’ll know what’s available in QuickBooks.

Let’s start with Company & Financial because this has two of the most important reports in QuickBooks. One being the Profit & Loss Standard and the other one we’ll look at is the Balance Sheet Standard.

I’m going to click on the Profit & Loss and show you how this works.

A Profit & Loss is designed to tell you if your company has made money or lost money. If you think about the Chart of Accounts and the different types of accounts the only types that show up on.

The Profit & Loss are income accounts, cost of goods sold. At the bottom, you’ll see your expense accounts. The way this works is QuickBooks will take all of your income accounts, add them up, and give you a total income right here.

Then, it will look at all the cost of goods and give you a total cost of goods right here. Subtract those from your income to show you the total gross profit right here. Below, that are all the expense accounts.

There’s a total of all your expense accounts down there at the bottom. At the very bottom of the list, it will say Net Income, meaning have you made money or lost money. That’s why we call this the most important report in QuickBooks.

Now, if you’re looking at these numbers and you think, “Oh these are awfully low” or doesn’t look right always, always, always check your dates in every report.

Notice this one goes from December 1 to 15. I’m going to change the dates over here. I’ll just say this fiscal year to date and you can see now that really changes the numbers a lot. So always check your dates.

The other thing you want to be aware of is that your reports in QuickBooks are run on an accrual basis automatically. You can see that right here. Let me tell you what this means. Accrual means basically that when you look at these income accounts there are invoices in here that aren’t paid yet.

So, as soon as you enter an invoice it shows it as income to your business. When you look at any of your expense accounts or your cost of goods those will be shown as expenses, even if, you haven’t paid them yet. That’s what accrual means.

When you flip to cash that means only invoices that have been paid and it’ll only show any bills or expenses that you’ve already paid.

Let me show you how big the difference can be. If you look at this one, for example, the total income right here is $449,493.89.

Let me go ahead and show you what it looks like with the cash basis. You can see it went to $379,000.00. That’s a really big difference.

Most of the time, when you’re doing your taxes you want to show this on a cash basis, but get with your accountant on this because this where he or she will tell you exactly what they want, and how they want these reports run.

Let me show you what the balance sheet looks like. I’m going back to Reports, Company & Financial, and let’s look at the Balance Sheet Standard. Remember, the Profit & Loss shows the income, cost of goods, and expenses.

The Balance Sheet shows all the other accounts in the Chart of Accounts and the balances in those accounts. Think about here’s your checking account and there’s the balance. Look at your accounts receivable.

There’s the balance. Here’s your undeposited funds. Here’s your assets. Down at the bottom, you’re going to have all your liabilities. That means all your loans. Think about if you go to the bank to get a loan.

Yes, they’ll want to know how much profit you’re making. But, they also want to know what the balances are in your accounts receivable, for example, so they know if money is coming in the door. Or maybe your payables so they can see if you owe a lot of money. These two reports are going to be very, very valuable.

Now, when I go back and look at these, I want you to notice that a lot of your reports will have a standard and a detail. You’ll see that for the P&L, and also for the Balance Sheet down here.

The standard shows you each account and then, the balance in those accounts whereas the detail will show you every single transaction that made up that account. So, that can be a very long report.

I want you to notice you run a Profit & Loss year to date comparison or a previous year comparison. I’ll show you this one.

This one shows me my current year, my previous year, the dollar change, and the percent change. This is really a good one to run if you’re looking at budgeting. All right!

You’re also going to be able to run a Profit & Loss by a job. So if you’re working with a job feature you can see it for each job you’re working on, and you can run one by class if you’re using the class feature.

If you are using the class feature there may be some transactions you didn’t put to a class and that’s what this unclassified report will show you.

I can look at income by customer, expenses by vendor, and also an income and expense graph. Let me show you what the graph looks like.

If you’re really into graphs and charts Microsoft Excel is the place to do that. But, there are a few things in here that are very helpful.

You’ll always see this column chart here, at the top, and a pie chart down here, at the bottom. If you notice, you’re currently looking at this by account, and at the bottom, if you’ll notice you’re looking at this by expense. I want to see this by the customer, and maybe my income by customer. So you can see, there’s a couple different ways you can look at these graphs. I can also look at it by class if I wanted to.

That’s pretty much the extent of looking at these reports. You can drill down and get a report on the particular place that you’ve clicked. But, I’m going to go ahead and close that, and show you a few of these other reports.

Back under Company & Financial, we did have some more balance sheet reports (if you wanted to look at those). There’s a balance sheet previous year comparison. If you’re into cashflow statements, you can see a few down here.

I’m going to go ahead, and stop the video at this point, so that, we can move over into part two. I can show you the rest of the reports.

Cindy McGuckin

Cindy McGuckin is an IT trainer with over 20 years of experience. Cindy currently manages the IT Training Department at Trident Technical College, she's a Member of the Association of IT Professionals, Charleston, SC chapter and the Treasurer of the South Carolina Association of Continuing Higher Education.Cindy is a Microsoft Office and QuickBooks expert and her online courses have received hundreds of 5-star reviews. Her no-nonsense approach to teaching complicated topics makes her classes engaging and interesting.