Sending Custom Reports in QBO Automatically

Linda Artesani shows how to automate invoice notifications in QuickBooks Online by creating custom reports and scheduling them to email daily. She sets up two reports, "Invoices and Received Payments" and "Open Invoices," filtered to today's date and saved to a custom group so you get both paid and outstanding invoices delivered each morning around 4 AM.
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Hi there, Linda Artesani, Community Live and Artesani Bookkeeping. So I'm still a little solo here, but I wanted to answer another question. I'm trying to jump on one every day, and I think these videos are helping people, so we're going to continue to do that. This one's from Jason Clark, and he wanted to ask about invoice status change alerts. Basically, his staff— he's probably got an AR department, he's got a lot of accounts receivable, a lot of invoicing, a lot of customer payments— and the staff is every day writing an email and sending him a note of this was paid, this was paid, this is the status, this is when the payment was received, this is the customer, this is the invoice number. He wanted to know if there's a way to automate that, that he can actually just get a notification every time an invoice is paid. So fortunately, Fritz F. from the QuickBooks team jumped in and let him know that, you know, I understand that this is what you'd like to have. This feature doesn't exist in QuickBooks Online, and he's absolutely correct, and you can only have— it's only available in the Merchant Services Center. So I got a suggestion for you, and actually, even though Matthew's not here with me today, he helped me along with this one because I had one idea, his idea was better. I'm only going to say that once, so if he's watching— So I'm going to come over to Reports, and it's a fairly new report called Invoices and Received Payments. And here it is. It's got your payment date and your invoice date. And what I would do in your case, because you've got a lot of accounts receivable, is I would actually set this to be showed as today, and then customize this report, and then send this report out on a daily basis automatically. Because that is the beauty of QuickBooks Online, that you can set it and forget it. So I'm going to leave this the way it is because I don't have a lot of AR in this sample file, but I just wanted to show you. I'm going to leave the report here. If you want to clean it up, if you don't want to see memo and description, you can just take that off. And then just kind of clean this up or add whatever you need to add. So this, this little gear here will help you add it. And then you can even change the date, the terms on this report to be whatever you want to call it. I mean, this isn't the greatest name. If you want to put it, you know, daily sales activity or daily sales and payment activity or something like that so it makes sense to you. And then I would come over here and save the customization. Now I've already gone ahead and added a new group And I made it Jason's group. So we're gonna grab Jason's group. We're gonna pretend this is formatted to today, and I'm gonna share it with all. So you'll come over here and you'll see here's Jason's group, and here's the sales and payment activity report, which is the report you want to send. And then you're just gonna go up here where it says unscheduled, and you're gonna edit that, and you're gonna turn the email schedule on. And it's set to daily for default. You put it every day, no ending, put Jason's email in here, and just Write in here, you know, daily sales and whatever you want to call it report. Hi, this is whatever. And then save and close. Now every day around 4 o'clock in the morning, it's going to send this email to him on a daily basis. He's going to get it. It's going to show the receipts just for the day. So whatever invoices were populated and a payment was applied. Now I would also go as far as maybe adding another report. So you can save another report here right in this section. So I would actually, because he's trying to track his accounts receivable, I would add to that grouping open invoices so he knows who hasn't paid him, right? So he's got the payments and received payments report, but how about who hasn't paid him? So I would save that customization and I would put it in Jason's group again, share with all, save. And now when you set that report up to go on a— in the grouping, you're going to be able to set it here to email it. So you have to toggle that switch on, you know, put an email address in here, and then, you know, you can just send it. If you want to send it as Excel, you can, and then save and close. So now this is going to show as a scheduled report. Every, every day I'm going to get these 2 reports coming into my inbox, and I'll be able to track my open invoices and also what activity happened In the day in your, in your company for your accounts receivables. So that's my answer for what I would do to work around the fact that it doesn't have that feature. And I would definitely do what Fritz said and send feedback if you think that that's something you'd like to see in the future. Intuit does look at feedback and is all about the customer. So hopefully that helps you, and maybe you'll see that feature in the future, but at least you have a workaround that will work. So if you have any questions, more questions, more feedback. We'd love to have you cheer our, our question up. Maybe send some feedback. Let us know that you want more of these videos and you found this helpful. And look forward to seeing you around the community. Bye now.
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