Using the Snapshot tool

The snapshot tools that you get in QuickBooks is the quickest way to find an overview of how your company is doing as a whole. To access the snapshot tools click Snapshots on the left-hand side under my shortcuts. It defaults to the company snapshot. The company snapshot contains modules containing things like income and expense trends. It shows you a list of customers who owe you money. All your account balances, your top customers by sales. You can scroll down to see all the available modules that you can have.

In fact, you can click Add Content from the top of the screen, and add more modules such as an income breakdown, yearly comparisons. The best part about the snapshot is you can customize each module. For example, in your Income and Expense trends here, you can filter the date. It defaults to this year to date, but if you only want to just see how you were doing this month, or last month, you could see that too. You can see your customers who owe you money, all your account balances, and then your top customers by sales. Again, you can filter the views.

So if you wanted to see which was your best customer just last month, select it from the view. And it'll change the data. Something else that's neat that you can do in the snapshots view is go to data directly. For example, if I look at my expense breakdown, this year to date, it will tell me all my expenses by category. But where I have the magnifying class icon, I can double click on it and it'll bring me up a report of exactly where that money went. Now I'll be showing you how to use reports in a later video. So I'm not going to go over it now. But you can close out of the report.

And it'll return you to your company snapshot. So I can click on any of these expenses and go directly to that report. Now, in addition to the company snapshot, there's additional modules. For example, there's a payment snapshot and a customer snapshot. If I select the customer snapshot, the first thing that I need to do is select which customer I want to see a snapshot for. I can click their name from the drop down in the center of the screen. I'll keep it on Blue Vine for now, and it gives me a fantastic overview about that customer.

For example, how long they've been a customer, how long it takes them to pay, what their current open balance are, how much they bought from me. I can see their recent invoices, and I can also double-click to go to any one. Just like I could in the company module under expenses. I can see patterns, how they do their spending. Any recent payments that they've sent me. And I can also see which items they like to buy the most. This is great at holiday time if I want to give them a company gift. I can give them a few extra bottles of the one that they purchase all the time. So take the time, go through these snapshots, see what they can do for you, add some content and get it all set up to just the way you like to see your data.

This is the best place to go to quickly find how your doing.