Chapter 21
Automating QuickBooks Analysis with Power Query
IN THIS CHAPTER
Getting started with Power Query
Cleaning up QuickBooks reports
Automating refreshable results
Ever feel like QuickBooks reports were designed by a raccoon — lots of garbage to sort through, and everything’s just a little, well, scattered? This chapter brings order to the chaos by using Power Query to automate the cleanup process that was tackled manually in Chapter 20. Just one catch: You’ll need the desktop version of Excel for this (such as Microsoft 365 desktop apps or Excel 2024); Excel for the Web (www.office.com) and Google Sheets (sheets.google.com) won’t cut it.
Instead of going through the same motions every time you export a report — removing unwanted columns, slicing off headers and footers, fixing those weird totals — you’ll create a set-it-and-forget-it connection that transforms the data faster than you can say, “Gee willikers!” Sure, you’ll still need to export the report and overwrite the existing file, but once that’s done, your cleaned-up version appears in Excel like magic.
And while PivotTables benefit from this — clean data makes them a breeze — they’re just one piece of the puzzle. ...
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