More Problems Getting Reports Out of QuickBooks.

Question:

Hi CPA,

I received your blog site from a friend just in time. Having tried to use the QB help topics and customer service without any success, I was hoping that perhaps you would be able to help me with a current dilemma that I have. I am using QB Pro 2005 and have been unable to get a profitability statement that will satisfy the owners of the company that I work for.

They want a statement/report that shows each invoice separately with customer name, invoice number, amount, and % of profit provided for them on a daily basis. I have tried to explain to them that this ends up being a cut and paste operation which takes a great deal of time. I've used as many filters to get a report that will work but at this time it is still a culminative gathering of three different reports. I've tried to convey to the bosses that QB has it's limitations and gives the % of profit for Customers, not individual invoices, and that the % of profit will be figured out for the total amount of sales for customers with multiple invoices. Furthermore, I have tried to let them know that the only way that I would be able to get a profitability statement for every invoice would be to run them separately every time an invoice is generated, slowly me down considerably and I would still have to use the cut and paste method because I have been unable to manipulate any report showing a separate invoice number with % of profit on one report.

Is there an easier way to generate a report that would be close to what the bosses want?

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thank you for this blog site.

Answer:

May I say...Holy Crap. It seems that your bosses are very demanding, and may or may not be financially savvy (they may just like paperwork).

From your question I can tell that you have a very good understanding of QuickBooks and how to manipulate the reports to the fullest extent possible.

As far as I can tell you are doing everything that you can to please your bosses with tools that you have been given. The only way that you could fix it, is to sell your bosses on more comprehensive accounting software. I believe that even something as simple as QuickBooks Enterprise Edition (Click Here for information about reports) would give you this functionality. Depending on the size of your operation, something as powerful as Microsoft's Great Plains might prove to be a fantastic solution for your bosses (they could have as many reports as they could imagine...and all you have to do is hit print). Unfortunately, with greater capability comes greater cost.