QuickBooks 2016 All-in-One For Dummies

Chapter 2

Preparing Financial Statements and Reports

In This Chapter

• Working with good information
• Creating a report
• Navigating the Report window
• Changing a report
• Processing multiple reports
• Retaining documents

QuickBooks produces — oh, I don’t know — about 100 different financial statements and reports. I tried to count them for purposes of writing this chapter but lost track after I’d counted 90-some reports. I figured that was close enough for my purposes here.

Because QuickBooks contains so many reports, I don’t provide individualized descriptions of each report in this chapter. Rather, I talk about some of the stuff that you need to do before you prepare financial statements. After covering those basics, I talk about how you produce and modify reports, and about some of the useful tools that QuickBooks supplies for working with reports.

Some Wise Words Up Front

This point is an obvious one, but you should note that the reports you produce in QuickBooks are only as good as the data file. If you have good, rich information in your QuickBooks data file, if the file doesn’t contain too many mistakes, and if all the transactions are entered, your reports should be pretty darn good.

This simple observation has one important ramification: Often, the first step in preparing good financial statements and useful reports is collecting all the data. In other words, you want to make sure that you’ve entered all the invoices, purchase orders, checks, and so forth. You also want ...