Business Analysis with QuickBooks®

Chapter 3. Digging Deeper with Pivot Tables

IN THIS CHAPTER

• A Sample Pivot Table

• Moving Data into a Pivot Table

• Special Features of Pivot Tables

• Sample Pivot Tables from QuickBooks Data

Chapter 2 ended with a brief description of building a pivot table from QuickBooks data. Because of the great flexibility of analysis that pivot tables offer you, and because it is so easy to port data from QuickBooks into Excel, this chapter describes the pivot tables features in much greater depth. You will see how to bring pivot tables to bear on QuickBooks data and explore patterns in your data that you simply can't uncover in the QuickBooks user interface.

Pivot tables do take some getting used to. Before you can begin to feel comfortable with them you have to learn a few special terms. And pivot tables are so powerful and flexible that you need some experience before new ways to use them become clear. The next section gets some of that housekeeping out of the way with an overview of pivot table fields.

A Sample Pivot Table

Figure 3.1 shows a mildly complicated pivot table based on QuickBooks' Rock Castle Construction sample file.

Notice in Figure 3.1 that you can see the joint effect of City and Class on the company's revenues. It's important to know whether there is a difference in how your products do according to your customers' locations. One reason is that knowing where different products perform best enables you to focus your marketing efforts.

In QuickBooks, you can view a report of sales by item. ...