11 Tips to Optimize QuickBooks Reporting: With Proper Guidance, CPAs Can Help Their Clients and Companies Use QuickBooks to Implement an Efficient and Effective Financial Reporting Routine

Paraphrasing the Kieso, Weygandt, and Warfield textbook Intermediate Accounting, the point of an accounting system is to summarize voluminous data to produce financial reports that management can use to run the business. Despite the textbook's position, it seems that many QuickBooks users have missed this message as they appear to use the product for little more than getting money in and out the door (via invoices and checks). To encourage better financial reporting among QuickBooks users, the JofA is presenting tips to help users streamline the reporting process and get the most out of QuickBooks' financial reporting capabilities. This article provides general tips for printing, memorizing, organizing, and distributing groups of QuickBooks reports. Next month, the JofA will publish another set of more specific tips for maximizing QuickBooks' reporting capabilities. 1. Generating and printing a collection of reports. To achieve proper reporting, companies typically need to produce dozens of weekly reports; however, when those reports are produced piecemeal or one at a time, the process is inefficient. To streamline the process, QuickBooks allows you to group dozens of reports together so they can all be printed in a single step. To use this feature, select Reports, Process Multiple Reports, select the report group to be printed, and then select Print, Print. The next several tips will walk you through the steps necessary to use this feature. 2. Creating multiple report groups. To use the Process Multiple feature, you must first create the necessary report groups such as Monday Reports and Month End Reports. Alternatively, some companies choose to group reports according to user or job function, such as Kim's Reports or CFO's Reports. To create a new report group, select Reports, Memorized Reports, Memorized Report List; then, from the Memorized Report pop-up menu, select New Group, enter a name for the new group in the Name box, and then click OK. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Once the new group has been created, one at a time launch each report you want to add to the group, make any necessary customizations (such as adding columns or adjusting the date range), click the Memorize button at the top of the screen, enter a report name in the Name box, select the new group from the Save in Memorized Report Group dropdown list, and click OK. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] 3. Memorize reports multiple times. To distribute multiple copies of the same report, memorize that report into the same report group multiple times, customizing the report name each time. For example, you might memorize the Accounts Receivable report into the Month End Reports group three times, labeling them as AR Report for the CFO, AR Report for the Sales Manager, and AR Report for the File Drawer. Using this approach, not only do all three copies of the report print with just one click, but each report also identifies the recipient in the report's title for easier distribution. To memorize a report to a group, open the report; modify the dates, columns, filters, etc. as necessary; and then press Ctrl+M to open the Memorize Report dialog box. (If prompted, click the New button to create additional copies of the same report.) Check the box labeled Save in Memorized Report Group, select the desired group, and then click OK. 4. Collate the group. As a final step to creating a new group of reports, open the new report group by selecting Reports, Memorized Reports, Memorized Report List, then drag and drop the diamonds preceding each report name to rearrange and collate them by recipient, as shown at the bottom of the previous page. Collating the reports by recipient makes it faster and easier to distribute the printed reports to the various users. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] 5. Reporting groups electronically. Companies that prefer to distribute grouped reports electronically (as opposed to paper reports) should repeat the steps described in tip No. …