One of the key benefits of QuickBooks Premier for small businesses is the ability to generate insightful reports easily. Premier comes packed with dozens of built-in report templates to analyze your company’s financial performance from various angles. Reports provide the crucial visibility you need into sales, profits, account balances, budgets vs. actuals, receivables and payables aging, inventory costs, employee hours, customer details, and more. They allow you to spot trends, compare time periods, drill into transactions, and gain the actionable intelligence you need to make smart decisions.
However, with so many reports available, it’s crucial to understand which ones to run regularly and how to customize and extract meaning from them. This article outlines the essential reports business owners should focus on in QuickBooks Premier and tips to harness them effectively.
Step 1: Key Reports to Run Frequently
Some QuickBooks Premier reports business owners should generate and analyze regularly include:
- Profit & Loss – to view income and expenses by period and see profitability trends
- Balance Sheet – to check assets, liabilities, and equity balances
- Accounts Receivable Aging – to check outstanding customer invoices and balances
- Accounts Payable Aging – to view unpaid vendor bills
- Sales by Customer Summary – to identify best customers
- Sales by Item Summary – to determine top-selling products/services
- Inventory Valuation Summary – to assess inventory cost and value
- Payroll Summary – to reconcile payroll totals and taxes
- Budget vs. Actuals – to compare actual results against budgets
- Customer Contact List – to access customer details in one place
- Vendor Contact List – to view key vendor information
Step 2: Customizing Reports
QuickBooks provides several customization options to tailor Premier reports to your business’s needs:
- Add or remove columns on a report to show/hide data fields
- Filter reports by date range, customers, items etc. to focus on pertinent records
- Change the sorting order to sequence information meaningfully
- Run report for specific accounts, departments, classes, locations etc.
- Compare two periods side-by-side – like this month vs. last month
- Display report in various views – summary, detail, pie chart etc.
- Rearrange columns on a report for desired layout
- Adjust font sizes and color schemes for easier reading
- Switch between accrual and cash basis reporting
- Set custom date ranges – like year-to-date or fiscal quarter
Customizing allows to deliver insights that are tailored, relevant and actionable. Analyze reports diligently to spot trends and variations. Drill into details to understand drivers and transactions behind numbers. Discuss concerning findings with stakeholders and decide on next steps. Leverage your ProAdvisor to enhance reporting. Used effectively, QuickBooks Premier reporting can provide crucial insights to optimize decisions across sales, profits, costs, cash flow, inventory, orders, receivables, payables, payroll, customers, vendors, and other facets of your business for improved performance.
Step 3: Analyzing and Interpreting Reports
Once you generate the customized report, here are some tips for analyzing and interpreting the data:
- Scan report thoroughly and observe patterns, trends, and outliers
- Identify accounts with unusual movements or values compared to norms
- Drill down into transactions behind totals to understand drivers
- Compare periods and totals to previous years to spot variances
- Discuss concerning trends or variations with managers and staff
- Highlight key metrics and share with stakeholders
- Set benchmarks and flags for potential issues – like low inventory, high AR balance
- Export and share reports via Excel, PDFs, and other formats
- Note aspects that require further investigation and follow up
- Summarize Insights and decide on next steps and actions
- Schedule automatic report generation and distribution via Premier
Proper analysis turns QuickBooks data into true business intelligence for better decision making.
Step 4: Get Help from Your QuickBooks ProAdvisor
As you get started with reporting in Premier, leverage the expertise of your QuickBooks ProAdvisor to:
- Guide you on the appropriate reports to analyze based on your business’s needs
- Customize and enhance Premier’s standard reports to suit your requirements
- Create new tailored reports using the custom reporting tools in Premier
- Set up automatic report generation and emailing on a schedule
- Show you shortcuts for quick report creation without using the full interview flow
- Help filter and massage data in Excel for further insights
- Train you how to drill down into details quickly on any report screen
- Advise you on interpreting complex reports and deriving insights
- Provide industry-specific best practices for financial analysis
Getting professional QuickBooks Premier support number will accelerate your reporting capabilities and ensure you use Premier reporting effectively.
Conclusion
QuickBooks Premier provides a powerful set of reporting tools to gain financial visibility into your small business. Focus on running key reports like Profit & Loss, Balance Sheet, Accounts Receivable and Payable Aging, Sales and Payroll Summaries, Budget vs. Actuals, and Customer and Vendor Contact Lists frequently. Customize reports to your specific needs by adjusting columns, sorting orders, filtering data, changing date ranges, and more.