What reports are most important? CFO shows top QBO reports

every business owner should be running at least two reports every single month as they're looking at their financial information so i'm going to show you how to find those two reports in quickbooks online and show you some variations on how to dissect the data in different ways to give you information to help manage your business so we're going to dive into that and a lot of the other reporting capabilities that quickbooks online has reports are actually one of my favorite parts about quickbooks and quickbooks online and that's what we're going to talk about today reporting your accounting information is what helps you see everything summarized in one place it helps you start to see the numbers of everything that you've been putting into the system with the bank transactions and everything and invoices sending out and bills being recorded and all these you know sales receipts all these things they all come together in reports so the report section is what we're going to talk about today and we're going to get into a screen share and this is our last kind of technical video showing you how to do stuff in quickbooks online and next week we have hector garcia here answering a bunch of questions about quickbooks and quickbooks online and we get into a lot of nitty gritty there we are really happy to have you here if you aren't already subscribed to the channel please subscribe did you know that like 15 to 20 of people who watch my videos are actually subscribed well i would so love it if you were actually subscribed to the channel and make sure that you've got the little notification button clicked as well because then you will see these videos as they come out and i do try to make things timely to what's happening in the year so if we've got an estimated tax payment deadline for example or maybe 1099 deadline things like that or maybe news about a certain loan program that we all know and love those notifications will help you make sure that you've got timely information sometimes people watch my videos when it's way too late for them to really do anything so i will stop talking about that and let's go ahead and get into quickbooks and let's talk about reporting okay so we're here again in the sample company of quickbooks online and today we're going to go over to reports and that's what we've got here in this section so there's you can scroll down you can see there's lots of different types and they're categorized and lumped together based on the topic so if you want reports on your sales and customers if you want reports on what you owe which is your liabilities and your accounts payable if you want reports on expenses and vendors you've got lots of different options here okay um i typically spend most of my time in these top three reports for most of my clients so we're gonna go through a couple of these today so um just very very basic if you are a business running in any type of regular cadence if you are in normal operations and you're working in your business every single month you need to be looking at two reports so i promised that at the very beginning two reports um we talk about the balance sheet and the profit and loss so profit and loss is the same thing as an income statement so if you hear income statement you hear profit and loss exact same report that we're talking about okay so balance sheet and profit and loss these two are very easily um i mean you can find those very easily i've favorited them by putting the little star by it but in business overview that's where you'll find the balance sheet and you'll find the profit and loss okay you have a lot of different ways we can break down the profit and loss but i want to show you first let's start with the p l because this is where we spend almost all of our time this is how this is the report you use to help you manage your business on whether or not the income coming in is covering the expenses in your business okay so when you sell things to customers or to clients money comes in it shows us income on the p l and then all the expenses that it takes to produce that income you know any cost of goods sold any labor any um regular general expenses are going to show up on the profit and loss so that's just a super super basic um example of what a profit and loss is or description of what a profit and loss is so that's just a really really basic description of what a profit and loss is um what you get at the end of the profit and loss is you get net income so that's the result of the profit and loss but when you're running a p l and i'm just going to use that terminology going forward when you're running a p l you need to think about some really key things and that's up here in the corner so all of this information up here in the corner is what you need to consider before you look at any of the data in the actual report okay and the very first thing you want to think of is what period am i analyzing do i so i am recording this in april and it's mid-month my financials i know that i don't do bank reconciliations except for once a month and that's at the very end of the month because that's when the bank statements are ready so i know that technically april data is not complete so what i'm going to look at is i'm actually if i want to see how i'm doing year to date i'm going to change the date range so it's going to go january 1 to march 31st because i know that's the last completed period and i'm also running my business on cash basis so i'm going to go ahead and run the report based on cash basis okay um so this is just a very standard p l you can do there's a bunch of custom you can customize the dates and then there's a bunch of kind of preset things you can do in here so i use this a lot sometimes i'll just go in here and go last month if i just want to look at last month run report and it'll show me only march if i want to see last quarter it's going to say it's going to say from the day you are today what is the last quarter so last quarter was q1 so if i run that it'll say january through march 2022. so these presets are really helpful to get reports really quickly but you can always customize a date range so let's say you wanted to see the last um you know 12 months in the data you can run that really easily in here so i would go all the way back to 4 1 and i can actually just type directly in here 4 1 of 2021 okay and then i can run report sometimes it will refresh and run that for you the thing with this craig's landscaping and design is they don't have a full year of data in here so um quickbooks if you could not do that that would be great so this is your p l this is where you're going to spend most of your time in your reporting a couple other things i like to do here is i like to display columns by months so display display columns by you can do this by quarters weeks days um i think months is the most helpful because most of us run in a monthly cycle um so this is where i can see you know income by month everything by month and it's a super helpful report i actually every single client i work with whenever we do a financial review we look at a p l by month this is something that is extremely critical to analyzing the monthly you know the monthly cadence of a business okay so i also want to show you a couple other things so let's say i want to look at last quarter because i want to look at q1 and i'm going to take it and just do totals only so it's showing me everything from q1 let's say i want to compare that to a previous period i have a comparison so i don't have to do this manually which is so great so it's going to take the previous quarter so if i said i'm running the report based on a quarter it's going to take the previous quarter of data so it's going to give me q4 of 2021. now if i wanted to change that and i wanted to do a previous year i could easily do that and i could compare it to q1 of 2021 okay there's the prior year that's what py stands for if you see um if you see that in your reporting pp stands for previous period all right so that is just giving you a really high level on what to do with your p l now i wanted to spend the most time on the p l because i feel like that is where i functionally spend the most time with my clients when we're reviewing um and that's what i find to be the most helpful because this gives you all the activity um that's been happening in the month so you can go in here and spend some detailed time looking at you know what was this expense what was that expense what was this what was that and that will help you um you know make any changes for the future okay um so the next thing that i think is extremely important for every business to look at every single month is the balance sheet and this one doesn't get as much attention as it needs but this one is also very critical to the running of the business so one thing you always want to do is you want to change the date if you're looking at the march 31st p l you also want to look at your balance sheet through march 31st okay and then this date range it's this is the critical date this ending date for a balance sheet this beginning date is really only going to change like i could i could make this number the day before and it's going to give me all the exact same information what it won't do is once i click on this it will only give me any activity happening between that date range so if you want to see a full year or you want to see year to date make sure you change this beginning date when you go to click on something that's happened here it will give you the the detail of anything happening within that date range that you're pulling for the balance sheet okay something to think about so i'm not going to go into how to read a balance sheet because i feel like that's a totally separate video um but the balance sheet gives you all the balances on your assets or your liabilities so this tells you how much is in your checking account at a date in time at a point in time okay so if i'm reviewing this on april 21st i cannot assume that i still have 2102 in my checking account unless that's account i never ever use um this checking account is probably something that gets lots of activity and i need to remember that these balances are at a point in time they're at the ending date of this report okay so um you know go through and look look through this report because this shows you what is in your accounts and and this is another reason why we want to kind of do our bank reconciliations in a timely manner and we want to do a financial review in a timely manner because if i look at my balance sheet and i don't look at my financials until three months later it's kind of it's not really all that helpful um so a timely review of your balance sheet is critical um what you're looking for on balance sheet two is like anything that looks off or odd any liabilities that are creeping up that should not be there um or you know maybe if your credit card is getting a super high balance and you're starting to feel like um maybe you don't have cash to cover it that's a major concern if you're looking at this on accrual basis you'll also see accounts receivable so you can flip through that so you can see everything that you have outstanding right now with your or at that point in time with your customers so lots to do on the balance sheet but this is showing you kind of what do you own and what do you owe okay that's what you own as your assets what you owe is your liabilities okay balance sheets super critical definitely look at that every single time um so the next thing that um so and then if you want to dive deeper into you know balance sheet comparisons you can do what i like to do is i like to see do the previous month so if i'm looking at um let's just do let's see last month and then let's do a previous period i'm doing cash basis so this tells me all the movements in the balance sheet between last month and this month when i say movements i mean okay i can see that the checking account was 4179 and now it's 2101 so there was a change of a loss of 2078 in my checking account so that was a movement um i also see that undeposited funds has increased that's actually kind of a problem we don't want that to be a huge amount of money there um you know i'm seeing that the credit card is going up from february to march that's also a concern so we have two problems here cash is going down and credit card debt is going up i'm not i'm not feeling like that's a positive movement just from a cfo perspective um we would want to see that if cash was going down that debt was also going down so this is a net um negative movement for this business this month um so that's just kind of a way that you can compare you can compare periods and you can kind of see you know are you trending in the right direction and i feel like a balance sheet comparison it can be really really helpful for that okay let's also look at a couple other things so a couple of the reports that i really wanted to point out to you guys um were a ar aging and ap so ar stands for accounts receivable and if you're doing your invoicing in quickbooks this ar aging is something you should run every single month it's very easy to run and i actually do this sometimes as of the date that i'm running it and then i will also look at it as of the end of the last month so i can see like in this situation that all of the bills were current and then i can see that we've got a few stragglers so these would be the people that you need to follow up with so red rock diner over here cookies by kathy these people are late payers and you want to check in with them you need to keep most of your accounts receivable as much as possible as current as possible so this accounts receivable aging summary is what will show you those things and if you see that you said hey actually redrock diner did pay me why is it on the aging that means that it didn't get properly matched when the cash came in that it didn't get properly matched in the accounting system so you'd have to go back and do that okay so it's really good to make sure that you're keeping this accurate and that these this truly represents people who need to still pay you now similarly if you're keeping track of your bills in quickbooks online you will also be able to use the ap accounts payable aging summary so same thing check your dates here because we need to know as of a certain date but this would be showing any of your bills that you have in the system now if you're not putting your bills in the system you're not going to have an ap aging summary okay so just keep that in mind um some people don't keep their bills in quickbooks online and that is okay if you have them manage some other way or maybe you just have things on autopay and you don't have a lot of accounts payable besides maybe a credit card or something that's totally fine we have some businesses that run like that and it's not a concern but if you do keep ap this is another thing so you can keep track and make sure you're not going to be hit with fees you're not going to be hit with penalties for late payment on your stuff okay so those are kind of the top the top reports and i just want to remind you guys as we're wrapping up here um to scroll through all these other reports and look through and see and start clicking on things and just see like what do you think would actually be interesting okay go in here and click on it if i see a a if i see ar detail how is that different from the summary and this is where we can actually see the individual invoice numbers okay um so there's lots of different things in here play around go and find stuff and i want to remind you guys that your reports are only as good as the data in just remember the garbage in garbage out principle if you do not have good data coming in you will not have good reports coming out okay so remember that that you know the bookkeeping is important that you know what you decide to do with your tags or with your classes or with your chart of accounts all of that stuff matters because if if that's not set up correctly or you're not using it in any kind of consistency the reporting feature becomes less helpful okay well i hope that was helpful for you guys walking you through a few reports that we think are really important and um you know how to run them things to consider when you're running reports and you know feel free to just like explore explore see what's in there go ahead and click on every single one change the date range and see what you think would be helpful what information does your does your system have that could be helpful to you or is there maybe a little bit more detail you need to be adding in your accounting so that you can get better reporting all right these are some things to think about well thank you so much for being here and if you haven't already liked this video please do so we much appreciate it i appreciate it so thank you so much alright bye

Channel: Clara CFO Group

Views: 8,469

Keywords: quickbooks online, quickbooks, small business, how to run p&l in quickbooks online, how to run a balance sheet in quickbooks online, balance sheet, profit and loss, income statement, reports in qbo, qbo custom reports, qbo P&L, QBO balance sheet, ar aging report quickbooks, ar aging, what financial reports should I review, financial reports to review, review financials, financial review, monthly financial review, qbo tutorial, top QBO reports, What reports are most important

Id: mmb0AbCmfNM

Length: 17min 6sec (1026 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 22 2022