How to Customize Reports in QBO

One of the most powerful features of QuickBooks Online is the ability to customize reports. And as some of you might know, there are numerous reports that are available in QuickBooks Online. And what this customization allows you to.

Do is to gain insights and analyze.

Your data that can literally help you.

Improve your bottom line.

Additionally, it helps you to save time and improves collaboration with your accountant and.

Various other stakeholders in your business.

And in this tutorial I am going.

To show you some of those customization options. My name is Veronica Canna.

I am a cpa, a CFA and the founder of Montreal Financial, where you.

Can find lots of resources for your small business. And I encourage you to sign up for my newsletter.

Okay. Okay. So let's take a look at some.

Of these customization options that are available.

And to do that we are going.

To look at the profit and loss.

Report which can be found on the left hand side by going to standard reports.

And then we are going to choose profit and loss.

So if you are a first time user of QuickBooks Online or even a seasoned user, a lot of people, people.

Are not aware of all of these customization options.

So I'm going to go over each one and what they represent and what kind of data you can get to a simplify your life, get incredibly powerful.

Insights and save time.

Okay, so the first one is the once you have the profit and loss statement, it is going to default to.

To a report period. It's different for everybody. It could be last month, it could be last year, whatever.

But here you can choose the period.

That you want and you can choose all dates.

You can choose custom dates by just changing the dates directly here. Or you can simply scroll down and.

Say choose this fiscal year. And once you choose that report period you would click on run report and.

You'Ll see that it gives you the.

Report from December 2024 to November 2025 in this case.

Now the next thing we are going.

To look at is display columns by and this is one of my favorite customization features and I will show you why.

So say I want to see all of the years since December 1st, 2020 to November 2025. I have an option of comparing to.

Another period and I could show the previous year and run report but this only shows me last year's versus this.

Year'S and ignore the differences.

This is a working copy. Sherlock Holmes is not as up to date on his bookkeeping as he should.

Be, but so this essentially is one of the most popular reports and this will generally be used for your financial.

Statements which show the current year and the previous year.

But let's say you want to see.

All years since December 1, 2020.

So what we're going to do is change this.

Period to December 1, 2020 to to November 30, 2025. And then I am going to display columns by fiscal years because I want.

To, I want to see each year.

And then I'll click on Run Report but I don't want to necessarily see the previous years.

It's just clutters and crowds of report. So I'll click on Run report again.

And you'll see here that I have a very sustained, succinct view of my profit and loss since December 2020.

You can make this whatever date you want to capture the information that you are looking for.

And then of course this report can be exported to Excel or it could.

Also be shared with your accountant or business partner, bank, etc. And to do that you would simply print it as a PDF or you could print it as a hard copy.

Or here you can export it to.

Excel or export to PDF. So there's various ways of getting this report into another format.

And again, if you look at the display columns by there's all kinds of.

Ways in which you can look at the columns.

So for example, let's say I want.

To see fiscal quarters. I will click on Run report and it just shows me all of the quarters. This is a little more detail.

Or I can do it by customers and then here you, if you look on the top, it gives me all of my customers and my sales by customers and some of my expenses are specifically allocated to my customers.

This is also something that you can do in Quick Books Online, which again is hugely powerful. That's the subject of another tutorial, but again it is an option to see.

This and perhaps you just want to.

See your sales by your customers across the top and just the total income amounts. Okay, so that's a display columns by.

This one is simply you can show non zero.

All this is useful if you have a lot of older defunct accounts and we looked at select period.

So I'm going to go back to total only and to the this actually.

Last fiscal year because there's a little more data.

Okay, so now the next thing that.

I can do in this report is.

I can click on customize and it gives me all kinds of options. So you'll see here we already looked.

At the last fiscal year. This is just the date period.

The accounting method for most of you.

Will be accrual Unless you're a commission based salesperson or a farmer. So you should use accrual.

But there is an option to also.

Look at it using the cash method. It may be something that a third.

Party may want like a bank or an accountant.

So in that case you can temporarily toggle this on, create a report and then go back to the accrual method.

You can have a number format without cents.

Your negative numbers can be formatted. I always like brackets on my negative numbers. And you can show them in red so they really stand out.

Okay, so now you can change the columns that you show. And we just looked at that by.

Customers or by fiscal year, quarters or years or calendar years, etc.

Now the next thing that is quite.

Interesting is this filter option.

And you can filter this report for very specific classifications. So perhaps you just want your customer.

To be and you want everything from Moriarty Inc.

So let's do that.

All income, expense accounts and let's run the report.

So the last fiscal year there wasn't really anything from Moriarty Inc. But maybe I want to see everything.

So I'll click on all dates, click on run report. And then we can see what Moriarty.

Inc. Has purchased from us and also.

Expenses that are related to him. And you can see that we wrote off a bad debt for him. And then you can further.

Categorize this by choosing fiscal years and run report. And you can see this happened in the 22 to 2023 fiscal years.

So if we go back to customize now we can take out this filter, simply click on it now it's just.

Going to revert back to all.

And then we can similarly do this with distribution accounts.

We can choose all types of accounts.

And remember these filters are available on.

Many reports in QuickBooks Online. So you can simply see the information that you want. We might choose a distribution account. And perhaps I just want the income account.

So I'm going to put all income.

Accounts run report and then click on run report.

And this is all of my income by year because I again I display.

The columns by fiscal year.

And so I can see all of.

My income simply by year and on and on.

There are other ways of location for.

Those of you who use classes and locations. This is in one of the higher versions of QuickBooks Online. But you can choose a location that you want to see your information for. And right now I currently only have.

One location, which is Ontario.

So I can click on that and it will only show me the data relating to Ontario.

And then the next thing I can change. Here is I can change the header and the footer so I can put.

The logo in, for example, the company name. Say I wanted to change the name of the company.

I could change it here temporarily.

If you wanted to do it permanently, you would do it in settings. You could call this income statement, which is another term for profit and loss or whatever else works for you. And then there are some other information that you can include. And you'll see here at the bottom you have the date, time, report basis, and you can take that out if you want. And then you also have the alignment.

So if we run report, you'll see.

That the logo appears because that was the only change that we made.

Okay, so now the next thing that.

You can do to save a ton.

Of time is to save your customizations. So let's say you want to see.

This report all dates, but you don't want to have to just keep generating it over and over again.

So you can simply save the customization profit and loss, maybe call it yearly.

And then you can add it to.

A group and you can share it.

With your accountant, or you can share it with other people in your company.

So I'm not going to share, but I'll click on save and then to go find the reports, I go to.

Reports, I go to custom reports reports.

And you'll see here is a profit.

And loss yearly and it appears exactly how I generated it.

And then I can further customize it.

And then save more reports as necessary. And again, the save customization is available for all reports. So if you look at a report frequently, it is definitely worth it to do this.

In addition to these options, as mentioned, you can email the report directly to.

Someone and you can save the file.

So now I'm going to click on email. I will enter an email address, I might want to CC someone and then put the subject. So rather than going in, saving it as a PDF and then finding it.

On your computer and sending it via your regular email, you can simply email it directly from here. As mentioned, you can print this and save it as a PDF. And we actually did that with the email.

The next thing you can do is export it to Excel, which is a super useful function. So I'm going to open this with Excel.

You can also save it to Google Sheets as well.

You'll choose Save it to Excel and.

Then use Google Sheets to simply open it.

And here we go.

We're going to click on Enable Editing so the data appears and all of the information is here, exactly how we want to see it.

And perhaps we want to update the format of this a bit.

We may use certain fonts, we want it to look nicer, or we want to be able to add up individual line items. This is particularly useful for reports where you have a lot of data in here and you want to get some real analysis and insights.

And so those are some of the ways in which you can manipulate the report. One final thing that I want to.

Point out, and again, for those of you who are slightly more seasoned users, you might know this already, but you can click on any one of these line items.

So if we click on Consulting Services for example, you'll see everything appears here.

For all dates for Sherlock Holmes Detective Agency, we can change the period by just going here. Perhaps you just want to see this fiscal year to date. You only have one sale this year or again you can customize the dates.

To see what you want to and then let's go back. I'm just going to choose all dates and and again if I export this to Excel, open with Excel.

Enable editing and you'll see all of the dates, all of the transactions appear here. And I have way more ways to.

Analyze and dissect this data from this from in Excel. So I took out the header, etc. And now I can just put a.

Filter on it and say I just want to see sales from Adversary company.

And click on Adversary and then I can sum this up and just sum.

Up this and there we go.

So I have all the sales from Adversary company and really that did not take me that long. There's many other ways to do this within QuickBooks Online, but this is one easy way. If you like to work with Excel Excel, and if you plan to save this report and send it to someone, this can be a useful way to do it.

So I hope that was helpful. If you have any questions, don't hesitate.

To leave a comment and I will try my best to answer it. And please like and subscribe and have a great day.