We call it Excel Gymnastics. Exporting to Excel, and then manually cobbling reports together, week after week, month after month, is a tremendous waste of time with too much opportunity for human error. Find out who in your organization is exporting from QuickBooks to Excel – and why. There’s a better way.

Who needs the data but doesn’t – or shouldn’t – have access to QuickBooks? If the only reason for having as many licenses as you do is to give people access to the Reports in QB, you could free up some licenses and save some money with a custom report, get useful information into the hands of those who really need it, and further protect your QuickBooks data.

Sometimes you need a “flat file” or CSV format for governments, banks, investors, and auditors, or to upload into different software applications. No need to do this manually! And sometimes, your manual report process may be compensating for a poor system set up, such as a Chart of Accounts or Items. You might even need customized account groupings for certain reports.

Sometimes a unique ratio or other calculation is needed. Perhaps the font, color, or placement of objects on the page is not editable in QuickBooks. You might even need dynamic images – such as photos of items or different logos. Another common requirement is for conditional features (If X then do Y). Custom reports do this beautifully!

Related data could be important – but you can’t link that to in-app reports. It could be as simple as needing a description for the Class – but there is no place to put that data in QuickBooks so it needs to come from another data source. We often use Excel for these kinds of situations – cheap and cheerful!

Need to send the report(s) out to more than a couple of people on a regular basis? We love using PDF-Explode for doing that – major time saver, and for some, a game-changer. This has to be done using Crystal Reports, so we can easily add the details that PDF-Explode requires.

Are you (or is anyone else) interrupting the work of someone in Finance to request a report on a recurring basis? Stop the madness and enable self-serve with a Custom Report!

Oh my – there are so many. Here are the general ones that apply to both QB Desktop and Online…

• When it says “Customize Report”, options are still limited
  • Can’t include combinations of periods (Month, Quarter, and Year)
  • Only have the fields offered
  • No custom fields!
• Can’t easily consolidate Multiple entities or Individual or consolidated Classes
• Can’t do non-standard reporting periods
  • e.g. 13×4 week periods, budgets

Here are the ones specific to QB Desktop…

• Commissions – only one sales rep and commission rate per customer – and no actual report to do the calculation
• Inventory
  • Can’t view inventory quantities for an item – with sales history
  • Can’t easily extrapolate quantities of assembly parts needed

And here are the ones for QuickBooks Online…

• Can’t easily get at the data
• If you do – it’s in Excel format
• The built-in Dashboards are wrong if your account isn’t reconciled because QB double counts the unreconciled transactions!