How to Run Financial Reports

Financial Reports are an important part of Bookkeeping. Your Bank Account may have a positive balance, but that doesn't necessarily mean you're making a profit. QuickBooks does the work behind-the-scenes, making it easy to run financial reports with just a few easy steps.

The two main Financial Reports are the Profit & Loss (otherwise known as an income statement) and the Balance Sheet. It is a good idea to run these reports each month after you have reconciled your account(s).

To run a Financial Report:

1. From the Home page click the Report Center button on the tool bar.

2. Select Company & Financial under Reports on the right-hand side of the screen.

3. Click on the type of report you want to run (Profit & Loss Standard, Balance Sheet Standard, etc).

4. You can now modify the report to show more or less detail, a specific date range, etc. (More information on modifying reports will follow in a future blog).

*If you make many modifications to a report or need to run a report regularly, it is a good idea to memorize the report so that it can be easily accessed at a later time. Simply click the Memorize button on the report screen and follow the steps to name and save the report.

5. If you want to narrow in on a specific account on a report simply double-click on the dollar-figure and QuickBooks will open a Transactions by Account report which lists all of the transaction that make up the figure.

Keep in mind that if you change any data in the specific date range that the report covers, the report will change. This is why it is smart to reconcile your accounts prior to running Financial Reports.