QuickBooks 2013 For Dummies

Reports Made to Order

If you intend to print a large number of reports — and, more important, if you intend to print a large number of reports and show them to customers, investors, and other significant people — you want your reports to look good and to be easy to understand. I believe that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so I’m not going to get into the aesthetics of report layouts. What I am going to do is explain how you can make QuickBooks reports look exactly the way you want them to look.

Choose Edit⇒Preferences. Click the Reports & Graphs icon in the list on the left and then click the Company Preferences tab to see the Preferences dialog box, as shown in Figure 15-7, for reports and graphs.

You need to be logged in to single-user mode as the administrator to change company preferences. Read how in Appendix C.

Figure 15-7: The Preferences dialog box for reports and graphs.

Here are your options:

Accrual: Accrual is one of those cruel accounting terms that can be hard to understand at first. If you select the Accrual option button in the Summary Reports Basis panel, you tell QuickBooks to include all your transactions, sales, purchases, expenses, and so on, from ...