QBO tips schedule reports

Hi there, Linda Artesani, Artesani Bookkeeping, back for another quick tip. So today's tip, and I'm going to take you to my file, and actually taking you to my 5 for 5 that I mentioned last week, which is my, my sample file that I took an old QuickBooks Desktop file and imported it when they used to give you specific ones by industry. So it's a little bit dated, but I pulled it in and it's a good place to start. So one of the tips I want to give you, if you work in QuickBooks without using the app and you want to work in QuickBooks and say I'm working on any report page, any page, and I want to— oh, I'm in here and I want to open up the balance sheet. I also want to open up the profit and loss. Couple ways you can get there. You can come right up to your tab that's open, right-click on it and duplicate. Don't need to translate it. And now I've got the balance sheet open, but maybe I want to open up the P&L. So I can come over here and open the P&L. Another way is I can just come over to Reports and then grab— let me see if I can pull up another report— and just grab Accounts Receivable Aging Summary. I'm right-clicking on my mouse and I'm going to open up in a new tab. Maybe you're working in a file and you want to open it up in a new window. Because you want to compare 2 company files. So maybe I want to open it up in an incognito window so I can have a different company open so that I can compare it. Right-click again and you can do the same thing. So there's a lot of little tips there that you can kind of work through that you can see that sometimes it's a really great way to see more than one thing on the same page. If I want to click back and forth, I can come over to The profit and loss. I can come over to the balance sheet, same company file, and I can come over to whatever I want to have open on the third tab. If I wanted to have incognito, I can actually open another company file and then compare. So if it— it's a really great tip. So if you have 2 companies that maybe have intercompany loan going on and you want to see the loan on the books that was the loaner and the loan, the person that was getting the loan, you want to show the liability, you want to show the current asset, you want to see that the payments are all in there. So the balance is the same. They have to be the same. If one company's loaning to the other company, those 2 balances, even though they're in different parts of the balance sheet, they're going to be the same. So that's a quick tip there. Another thing that I love, and I have to say my favorite, one of my favorite features is custom reports. So you can actually come in here and make some custom reports. I do this for all my customers. I make a year-end grouping. And depending on a lot of times if they're cash-based, they might want to look at their reports during the year on an accrual basis. And then at the end of the year, they just want to have that grouping sent to the accountant. And you can schedule them, you can make it so that you can export them to PDF. I— if you want to schedule them, you can just edit. And again, you have to turn on a toggle just like last week, turn on the toggle. Now you can set the recurrent recurrence, right? You can set it to monthly, daily, whatever. What I like about this feature is I use it for— you can use it for your suspense account. So I use an account, it's called Ask My Accountant, but you can also use it for— you can rename it. I sometimes rename it Questions for Mary, Questions for Jane, whoever is the person that owns the company. And I set that up sometimes depending on who's doing the work. I'll set that up to go automatically to the client once a month. And it'll be just those questions that maybe you have that you don't know what a transaction is. So you want to start to Ask the client this once a month. You put the things in the suspense accounts. Maybe it's Amazon. They bought something from Amazon and you're not sure what they bought. It could be anything. Could be ink or paper. It could be an office supply or it could be something totally different. So you want to put that in your suspense account. And then when you send the email, I'll just send it on the one account. So the suspense account would be— I'm just going to open up the accounting fees, but pretend that's the suspense account and I don't know what this transaction is. I'll stick it in that account. And then I will schedule that. Once you make it customized and you customize your report to just, just this one thing, and I'll even rename the report like these, you know, I'll rename it. These are questions I need answered, and I'll write it right in there. And then once I save it, I just create a group called monthly, and you can just make a new group, right? You can just go in here, just go monthly and then add it and then save it and call it questions. Questions on transactions, you know, questions for this can be the name of the report, and then you share it with everybody. And then once you've shared it, if you have staff, I highly recommend sending that report to yourself once a month first and taking a look at it and seeing if maybe staff isn't really putting their thinking cap on. You don't want to send a report month after month to your client and then you find that the client's like, gosh, you couldn't figure out that Verizon was telephone. You really might want to send it to yourself first until you've got the staff member educated to be able to do that and make it so that they go through that account themselves before this gets sent. What I usually do is I have this go— usually I try to get all the accounts reconciled about the 5th of the month. And then I'll have this report go out to me or to the client, depending on the person I've got working for me, and send it out. And then they can answer the questions. And most of my clients are pretty good. With the exception of the contractors, most of the clients are pretty good about getting the answers back. The attorneys are phenomenal. They're like, boom, here's the answers. I love it. Some of the people will just ignore it and the list will start to grow because it's month after month after month. They'll just keep getting it. And if it doesn't get answered, they just— it just happens to be that they just, by the end of the year, eventually they're gonna have to answer the questions when it comes to tax time. Also, what I do with the report As you'll see, here it is. When I set up the scheduling, I will actually make sure that as I set it up, as you see here in the customization— let me go back for a moment. Let me go back here into the scheduling. So I haven't scheduled it yet, but you can actually attach the report as an Excel file. Really super powerful tip. If you send it as an Excel file, they have a whole column that they can answer the questions in. What is this for? And then you've got a row they can— it can line up. It's so easy. So some people like a PDF. But a lot of times the client will love getting the Excel spreadsheet so they can just answer the questions and then send it back. So you're automating a part of the job that's necessary. And I find it's easier to do it month over month than to do it at the end of the year. Like I said, some clients aren't going to answer or they're just going to ignore it. And that's fine. Eventually they're going to have to answer the question. So don't stress out about things sitting in suspense for the year. But know that if you send it on a monthly basis, especially if you're working with a professional like an attorney, they generally will get back to you. I find that even my designers, they work— they do the same thing. They're really good about getting back and getting that information back to me. So hopefully that's a helpful tip. I really do like the memorized reports and customizing them and sending them out. I do that also with the financial statements. One of the jobs of the bookkeepers at the end of the month Is to once everything's reconciled around the last week of the month when things start to get a little bit slower, I want them to go through all the records, go through the balance sheet, go through the trial balance using the reclass tool and make sure everything's in the right categories. So that way I have the custom reports send me the financials every month for my clients. I review them. I actually stagger the days. I'm not hit with, you know, 45 profit loss and balance sheets. I stagger it. So like, okay, Monday was this client, Tuesday is this client. So I start to get those in. And then once I've reviewed them, then ultimately I will, I will actually go into the file and I have it set up using the other tip, which is that other, the expanded files, and I save those and then I will send them to the client. And that's a little bit less automated and depends on the customer as well. Some customers, I do not send them financial statements because they don't look at them. And some customers do want to see it every month. So a lot of times it's just a quarterly thing. But it's something that you can use and it's a really helpful feature. And I'll link back into the, into the notes so you can find that whole section on how you can create those and make them memorized so you can save the dates and save some of the settings. So I hope that's helpful. I know that was kind of a lot for a short tip, but using those memorized reports is so powerful. Use that for yourself. Use it for your businesses that you work with. It's, it's helpful to do this stuff during the year. You're giving the client live, accurate data all year. And then at the end of the year, you're not crunched back to try to go back and do all that work and get it all accurate in January when you're the most busy. So thank you for watching. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to reach out. Hope you have a wonderful week. Bye now.