Running a report

Running a report is easy. QuickBooks has ways to run reports in dozens of places within the program. You can run reports from the Report Center, the Reports menu, the icon bar, the Customer Center and other centers and many more places besides. But the Report Center and the Reports menu are the two places where you can find all the reports that QuickBooks offers. Then once you run a report, chances are you want to modify it in some way, a different date range, or to show the results for specific customers for example.

You can run reports from the Report Center or from the Reports menu. On the Reports menu, point to the category that the report is in, such as Company & Financial. Then choose the report you want, Profit & Loss Standard for example. To run reports from the Report Center, on the Reports menu, choose Report Center. No matter which view you use in the Report Center, the icon for running the report is the same.

It looks like a piece of paper with text on it. The tooltip says Display Report. If you want to set a Date Range choose it in the dropdown list. Then click the Display Report icon and QuickBooks opens a window for the report. The toolbar in the Report window has a few tools for tweaking the report. If the date range still isn't what you want, you can choose a new date range in the dropdown list or you can type dates in the From and To boxes.

For some reports you can adjust the columns that you see. For example, in the Profit & Loss report you can switch to showing values for each fiscal quarter. If I change this report to This Fiscal Year, you'll see columns for each quarter of the year. To make more in-depth changes, click Modify Report. In the Modify Report window, you can change what you see in the report, filter it to show exactly what you want, change the information that appears in the header and footer or format the text and numbers.

When the report is the way you want, you can memorize it so you can run it again and again. In the Report window toolbar, click Memorize. Type a name for the report that identifies what it does, like Profit & Loss This Year. Click OK to memorize the report. After you memorize a report, it shows up in the Report Center and on the Reports menu. On the Reports menu, choose Memorized Reports.

If the report is in a group, point to that group. Otherwise, it's right on the Memorized Reports sub-menu. In the Report Center, click the Memorized tab. Click the group you added the report to, but if it isn't in a group, click the Uncategorized group. There is one more slick trick for making a report easy to get to. While the Report window is open, on the View menu, choose Add (report name) to Icon Bar.

Then the icon bar has an icon for that report always ready for you to click. Memorizing reports makes it easy to rerun a report that is set up exactly the way you want. If you decide to change the report later on, you can always make the changes and re-memorize the report.