QuickBooks offers a standard set of reports by default that cover a broad section of what you’ll need, but they may not cover everything that you want to review. Fortunately, you can customize reports so they pull the information you’re looking for, and save any reports you customize so they’re one click away the next time you need them.
When you have a report open, there are a couple options across the top that you can change – the date range, columns to show, and how to sort the rows on the report. If you click on Customize Report in the upper left, you’ll get more options to make the report your own. After you’ve made changes to a report, if you don’t like how it turns out, you can click Revert within the Customize Report window and set it back to the original settings. If you like the adjustments, click Memorize on the top of the report, give the report a name, and save it in a memorized report group. You can run the report in the future by going to Reports – Memorized Reports and selecting the group and report that you set up.
If you have several reports that you run on a regular basis, it can be time-consuming to run each of them individually. To save time, go to Reports – Process Multiple Reports and you can run as many reports as you want at once. If you leave the window on All Reports, you can check off each report you want, or you can select a group of memorized reports, and QuickBooks will default to running all the reports in that group.
If you want to add a new group of memorized reports, go to Reports – Memorized Reports – Memorized Report List. On the bottom left corner, click on Memorized Report – New Group. You’ll be able to save reports to this group and run them as a batch with the Process Multiple Reports function. If you have a set of reports that you run on a set schedule, e.g. weekly or monthly, saving them as a group is an easy way to run them all at once. You can do the same for a set of reports that you send to a specific person, e.g. the CFO, or the accountant who prepares your Form 990 or tax return.
Do you want to customize what order your reports run in? In the Memorized Report List, you can rearrange which order of the reports for each group. Next to the report name is a diamond; click on it and drag the report up or down. When you run the group of reports via Process Multiple Reports, QuickBooks will generate them in the order they appear on this list.
If you send reports electronically, you can email reports directly from QuickBooks, but only one at a time, even if you use the Process Multiple Reports option. You can still streamline it by selecting the PDF or XPS option when you print via Process Multiple Reports, save them to the same folder, and attach everything to an email. Process Multiple Reports doesn’t let you automatically export everything to Excel, but you can at least run all the reports at once, then individually export them.