Customize Reports and Email
Don't have QuickBooks?
Read step-by-step instructions
Navigate to the Reports Page
Let’s start by customizing a Profit & Loss report. To do this from the Home Screen, go to the Reports tab on the left navigation bar.
Open Profit and Loss Report
Start by opening the regular Profit and Loss report.
On the Profit and Loss report page, click Customize.
Familiarize Yourself with Customization Options
You’ll notice that there are several options available for customizing your reports. If you’ve got some time, try playing with the different customization options to see what they do. You won’t hurt anything, and you don’t have to save your experiments.
Customize a Profit and Loss Report
For this example, first we’ll choose to show Profit and Loss by month. To do this, go to Rows/Columns settings and in the Columns box, choose Months as your parameter.
Next go to Header/Footer and change the Report Title to Profit and Loss by Month. Click Run Report to see your custom Profit and Loss by Month report.
Save Customizations
To save your changes to this report, click Save Customizations in the top row of options.
In the Save Report Customizations window, check the Add this report to a group box. Then type a name for your new report group into the text box, for example “Management Reports.”
Click Add Management Reports from the dropdown menu options available and click OK when you’re finished.
Save your new report group when you’re finished.
Retrieve Custom Reports
Any time you want, you can go to My Custom Reports and click the name of the custom reports you’ve created to run an up-to-the-minute version of them.
Create a Custom Sales Report
Now let’s create a custom sales report. For example, how about one for “Sales of you Design services by Customer” broken down by month?
To do this, go to the main Reports screen and type Sales into the search box. Then, from the dropdown menu options available, choose Sales by Customer Summary.
Next change the Transaction Date to Last Quarter. To do this, click on the box next to Transaction Date.
Choose Last Quarter from the dropdown menu options available.
At the top of the screen, click on Customize.
Enter Sales Report Customizations
Go to Rows/Columns and choose Months in Columns.
Now go to Lists and choose Design for your Products/Services.
Finally, go to Header/Footer and title this report “Quarterly Design Sales by Month” then click Run Report.
In your Custom Sales Report, you can see that Design sales lagged in January, but picked up by March. Don’t forget to save your customizations by clicking Save Customizations at the top of the screen.
Add this report to your Management Reports group, following the same steps you did in the last example.
Set Email Schedule for Reports
You can email your Management Reports to your business partner every month. To do this, first go to the Reports screen and find the group under the My Custom Reports tab.
Click on the name of the report group, in this case “Management Reports” then click Edit.
Click Set the email schedule for this Group. Enter your partner’s email address into the “To” field below, then click Edit Schedule.
Edit Email Schedule
In the Edit Schedule menu, choose Monthly on the First Monday of every Month. Click OK when you’re finished editing the schedule interval.
Back on the Report Group Settings page, click Save. Now all the Management Reports will get run automatically and sent to your partner on the first Monday of each month.
Explore Different Kinds of Reports
QuickBooks has reports that are relevant to specific kinds of businesses. You can customize these reports to suit your unique business.
For example, if you do projects for customers, customize the Profit & Loss report with a Customer column to see your profits by project.
Or if you run a nonprofit, you can customize the Statement of Activity report to see how much you’ve spend on fundraising, programs and administrative expenses.
Or if you’re in retail or ecommerce, you can customize the Profit and Loss reports to see how much of each dollar of sales you spend on overhead expenses like rent and utilities.
