Bookkeeping Software Reports

In my opinion working with reports is one of the more difficult things to do in bookkeeping software. If the reports that you need are in the predesigned ones, that is great. Most of the time that will be all that is needed. When you want to customize a predesigned one or create one from scratch, it is harder to do. My advice to you is to regularly look at the reports that are available to get familiar with them and what kind of information they hold. This is another area I cannot give you precise direction here without knowing what bookkeeping software is being used.

You do have choices with the predesigned ones in order to view specific information, without going through a whole report creation process. The main one you’ll want to adjust is the start and ending dates. You can use any dates you want, even if there is no data during the timeframe you selected. Some bookkeeping software has monthly, quarterly or yearly reports already set up for you. You may be able to choose between cash and accrual reports. You can remove columns that you don’t need or add ones you do. Once you have the data pulled up with your parameters, you can sort individual columns by various methods. Printing reports can really be fun! (Sarcasm there) They don’t often fit on a page very well and some data will be on later pages, making them hard to read. I advise you to use the Preview function before you print, so that you can make changes to the report as you wish and get the output you are looking for, and then print it.

Some bookkeeping software will have a button for exporting reports to Excel, which is very handy. You just need to be sure you have all the information included in the report that you will need before you export it. Once it is in Excel you can manipulate as you wish and it has no effect on your bookkeeping software at that point.

Some bookkeeping software will allow you to drill down in a report to see where the data came from. You double click on a line item in the report and the original transaction will come up for viewing. I recommend that you do that in order to learn which transactions show up in different spots on reports. Then close the transaction and it will take you back to your report.

You will want to run reports on certain things fairly often. And all reports are not named the same thing in different software. But that doesn’t mean you cannot get the exact same information. For instance, your customer invoices might be shown in an Accounts Receivable or Customer Balance report. And Accounts Payable or Vendor Balance reports are the same thing. You might have Income Statement or Profit and Loss reports but they are the same. In my jobs, I run the Profit and Loss, Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable, Payroll and Job Cost reports often. Sometimes it is just for my use in doing my job and other times I send them out to other parties.

Once you customize a report to include only what you need, you can save it or memorize it and name it. At least in some software. Then you can use it just like the predesigned ones any time you wish.