QuickBooks 2011: The Missing Manual

Other Helpful Financial Reports

Although financial statements are the ones that people like shareholders and the IRS want to see, other financial reports help you, the business owner, keep tabs on how your enterprise is doing. This section describes a few QuickBooks reports that help you evaluate your business’s performance.

Note

Reports that apply to specific bookkeeping and accounting tasks are explained in the chapters for those tasks, such as accounts receivable reports in Chapter 13.

• Reviewing income and sales. If you’re introducing enhanced services to keep your best customers—or you’re looking for the customers you want your competition to steal—use the “Income by Customer Summary” report. Choose Reports→Company & Financial→“Income by Customer Summary” to see total income for each of your customers; that is, the total dollar amount from all of a customer’s invoices and statement charges. Customers with low income totals might be good targets for more energetic sales pitches. If you find that most of your income comes from only a few customers, you may want to protect your income stream by lining up more customers. (One thing this report doesn’t show is how profitable your sales to customers are. The Balance Sheet explains how to see that.)

  Tip

  If you want to produce a report showing performance over several years to evaluate trends, you can set a report’s date range to include the years you want to compare. Then modify the report to show values by year (Date Ranges).

• Reviewing ...