Posted on 09/01/2008 12:05:19 PM PDT by Tuscaloosa Goldfinch
I need help with getting Quickbooks to print a specific type of report. I want an entire fiscal year expense report, just the totals, by categories of expenses, not by vendor. I've been able to get expenses broken down by vendor totals, but then I still have to go to some other software like Microsoft spreadsheets to re-enter my data. I've searched the quickbooks site and can't find the answer.
I use Quickbooks Pro 2007.
Thanks in advance.
Quickbooks Pro is an oxymoron.
My wife is proficient in several modular, multi-user accounting products, and she used to just about pee herself back when those radio ads aired where Quickbooks proclaimed that it “makes double-entry bookkeeping a thing of the past”.
If you want a really sick suggestion, find out if Crystal Reports interfaces with Quickbooks.
It’s worse than Adobe Acrobat or Photoshop in terms of the number of features, and it’s (from what I understand) incredibly painful and almost rune-like to use.
And tell me about Photoshop! We also have a photography business (www.fiveoclockimages.com) and my husband was asking me to fix artifacting in a picture we were looking at today and I think I'm going to have to go back to college to get a degree just to understand everything photoshop does. sigh...
Thanks for responding, anyway.
That’s probably your best bet.
However, there are probably people who are conversant with all the whistles and bells in Quickbooks who might actually be able to tell you how to do what you need to do.
Your Excel idea has merit.
My wife, even with years of expertise with the big accouting packages, regularly creates massive Excel spreadsheet templates to do things that even the report writers associated with those packages cannot do.
She has even gotten Excel “Formula too long” errors once or twice, as I recall, and getting one of those means you’re doing some *serious* crunching...
Good luck.
CPA's hate QBooks.
Ok, look at this.....
Reports/company and financial/expenses by vendor summary.....
There is expenxse by vendor detail
People like your wife amaze me.
Okay - I know that function is in there, I’ll try it, thanks.
Cut and paste the expense portion of the P&L
Bookkeeping is the “B” in BDSM, statistics is the “S”.
:-)
What do CPAs prefer? (That the average small business owner can learn and run?)
THANKS! That pretty much did it.
Fwiw, I was discussing this recently with a retired CPA whose take was that Quickbooks is more of a traditional accounting software that a CPA can move around in, but that Quicken is more user friendly for an actual hands-on small business owner. So CPA’s might prefer Quickbooks because their clients may need them more for reports and analysis, etc.
If you have inventory to deal with, you might want to look at the Peachtree line.
Good idea: Doing it in Excel.
Bad idea: Printing it out and rekeying it.
See if Quickbooks has an export function in its menus that would allow you output the relevant numbers to a file in .csv or tab-separated text format (or maybe even in native Excel format!). Once you have the data in that form, it is easy to import it into Excel and turn your Excel skills loose on it.
You may also be able to simply copy numbers out of a screen display in Quickbooks and paste them into an empty Excel worksheet. Excel will then show a dialog asking how to split the data into columns.
Example: Every election here the Boston Globe puts out a list showing the vote tallies in each of the 300-odd cities and towns in Massachusetts. It's in the form of an HTML table on their boston.com website. If you select and copy the table in the browser and paste it into Excel, it turns out Excel understands the HTML well enough to get all the data into the right columns. After that, it's easy to add columns showing Republican / Democrat percentages and sort to see which areas are the most moon-batty (Cambridge, Provincetown, Boston, etc.).
This website has some free demos. I made the mistake of deciding before thoroughly examining the options. Don't do that. Take your time.
http://www.2020software.com/compare-software/category/2/Accounting-Software/?tse=Yahoo&tst=accounting+software+for+small+business+B&CMP=KNC-Yahoo&OVRAW=small%20business%20accounting%20software&OVKEY=small%20business%20accounting%20software&OVMTC=standard&OVADID=3371440521&OVKWID=33576377521
I’ve been using QuickBooks Pro since v3.1 in 1995. My CPA has never suggested anything else.
I give him an Accountants Copy of my books on disc each year, and I print out all of the reports he needs. He takes it from there.
If there’s a better app. I’d love to discuss it with him.
I’ve had the same experience! I’ve had CPA’s who swear by it and I can even upload to their sites. Then I had a CPA who called it trash. Since you can change a post without benefit of JE, he felt it was so much garbage. I just got 2008. Looks like a great program.
That’s why I just keep Audit Trail enabled. It’s been enabled since 1996.
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