Building Quickbooks Sales Reports: Made Easy

QuickBooks, Accounting Software is an elegant solution for all your Accounting and Bookkeeping problems. Thanks to QuickBooks you can now create Interactive Dashboards where you can keep a Tab on Daily Sales and keep yourself updated. With its Standard collection of QuickBooks Sales Reports, it is now even easier to analyze your Sales Data and make Data-Driven Strategic decisions.

In this article, you will learn in-depth about QuickBooks Sales Reports and how to customize them according to your Business Use Cases and Needs.

Understanding QuickBooks

QuickBooks provides a unified one-stop solution for all small and medium-sized enterprises that solves all their growing Accounting needs. This tool is brought to the world by Intuit, a leading software company with a deep focus and understanding of Financial Softwares. 

Quickbooks is available as a Cloud-service and On-Premise solution. Using this application, you can keep an eye on all the Transactions, Taxes, Expenses, Sales, and much more. With a growing customer base, Quickbooks also acts as a Powerful and Scalable Database.

It is important for you to keep the historical records with the daily updated data so that you are aware of the Market Trends and act accordingly. It has a user-friendly interface and doesn’t require prior technical Accounting Knowledge to operate it. Thus, you can get on-boarded to the software in no time and start building useful Financial Reports.

Standard QuickBooks Sales Reports

Sales Reports give an overview of your Invoicing, Billing, and Sales Process. These can provide the Sales Managers deep insights into the Customer Base, Sales Representatives, Product Performances, Revenue, and the Total Financial Health of your organization.

There are 4 basic categories in the QuickBooks Sales Reports with each category generally having subcategories namely Detail Report and Summary Report. A Summary Report provides an overview and Net Sales regarding the products and customers. Whereas a detailed report will display the transaction details also associated with an item or customer.

You can find these default reports by :

• Navigate to Reports on the side menu.
• Type Sales in Report by Name field as shown in the Red Box. 
• You will see a list of QuickBooks Sales Reports such as Sales by Customer, Sales By Class, etc. From there you can select the required reports.
• Click Run Report.

Let’s have a look at the major 4 Standard QuickBooks Sales Reports:

• Sales Report By Customer: This will contain Orders and Sales details associated with all your customers. It has 4 subcategories namely:
  • Sales By Customer Summary: Displays Total Sales linked to each customer and the Specific Job.
  • Sales By Customer Detail: In this Detailed QuickBooks Sales Report, Transaction details are also displayed along with the Total Sales for each customer and Job.
  • Pending Sales: Sales with customer Details that are in a pending status.
  • Sales Graph: Displays information about Sales sorted by a reporting period(like a month), item, or customer in a graphical interface. This could help in determining which customers bring in the highest income? 

• Sales Report By Item: This QuickBooks Sales Report helps you understand which products or services are popular and which one of them needs improvement. It has 2 sub-elements:
  • Sales By Item Summary: Provides an overview about the quantities of the different products sold, which items are the best performing etc.
  • Sales By Item Detail: Provides a more in-depth report with details about each transaction. 

• Sales Report By Sales Representative: You get to know about the performance of your Sales Representatives. Its 2 sub-parts are:
  • Sales By Rep Summary: It depicts the Total Sales done by each of your Sales Reps.
  • Sales By Rep Detail: It lists down information about each Sale done by each of your Sales Rep.

• Open Sales Orders Report: It displays details about the orders where the purchase has been made but the goods have yet to deliver. It has 2 subcategories:
  • Open Sales Order by Customer: Provides figures about the Open Sales orders linked to the customer or a job.
  • Open Sales Order By Item: Similarly, these reports display particulars about Open Sales orders related to different products/services.

Prerequisites

• A QuickBooks Online Account.
• Working knowledge of Quickbooks.

Steps to Generate Top 3 QuickBooks Sales Reports for Businesses

Most of the small businesses deal with few selected Sales Reports on a regular basis. You can add information and customize these reports as and when required. Following are the most in-demand QuickBooks Sales Reports that a Sales manager may require:

• Monthly Sales Report
• Gross Sales Report
• Sales By State Report

Let’s have a look at how to create the top most used Quickbooks Sales Reports that every organization needs.

A) Monthly Sales Report

A monthly update on your Sales will let you know the current customer mood as well as the overall performance of your company.

To run this QuickBooks Sales Report follow the simple steps shown below:

• Step 1: Click on Reports on the Left-Hand Menu.
• Step 2: Type Sales in Report By Name Field.
• Step 3: A list of reports will appear, select the one you need.
• Step 4: Choose This Month to date in the Report Period Drown Down on the top left corner.
• Step 5: Click Run Report.

B) Gross Sales Report

This Quickbooks Sales Report is important especially if you are in the Customer Retail Industry. It helps in identifying the Total Turnover and measuring the growth of the Business.

You can generate this report by:

• Step 1: Navigate to Reports on the Left Side.
• Step 2: Enter Sales by Product in the Search Box and select Sales By Product/Service. from the drop-down list.
• Step 3: Choose the Report Period.
• Step 4: Click Run Report.

In the end, this will show your total income or the Gross Revenue as shown in the Red Box below.

C) Sales By State Report

This helps you understand in which specific region is your product/service performing the best and from where are your biggest customers. Before setting up your report, let’s ensure that the Track Location feature is turned ON to track your transactions by location in your report. To do this:

• Step 1: Navigate to Settings ⚙ and select Account and Settings.
• Step 2: Click Advanced.
• Step 3: Choose the Edit ✎ icon in the Categories section.
• Step 4: Tick the checkbox to track locations.
• Step 5: Click Save and then Done.

After this, you need to add the Locations for which you want to see the report.

• Step 1: Go to Settings ⚙️and select All Lists.
• Step 2: Click Locations.
• Step 3: Hit New, then enter the Names of the locations you want to track.
• Step 4: Click on Save and Close.

Now, you can easily generate your desired QuickBooks Sales Report by Location Detail. For that follow the steps below:

• Step 1: Navigate to Reports on the left side menu.
• Step 2: Enter Sales by Location Detail in the search box.
• Step 3: Choose a Report Period, Group by Location, and Accounting Method.
• Step 4: Click Run Report.

Limitations of Quickbooks Sales Reports

Tracking your Sales and overall progress has been simplified by the Accounting Solution provided by Intuit i.e. QuickBooks. However, while using this tool you may also experience some challenges:

• Standard QuickBooks Sales Reports available may not always contain all the necessary columns which you require from other reports. Currently, you have to manually download reports and edit them in Microsoft Excel to get the desired result.
• As your business expands, the use of other platforms also increases. This brings the problem of manual integration and sync between the software and QuickBooks. This may also require manual data entry sometimes.
• There is no option to build a QuickBooks Sales Report from scratch. The customization of reports is available to a certain extent.

Conclusion

• In this article, you have learned about how you can seamlessly create Quickbooks Sales Reports and customize the default reports.
• QuickBooks has turned out to be a popular Accounting Software among small businesses as it helps them keep track of the cash flow in their firm.
• Ease of Filing Taxes, Insightful Sales Reports and Dashboards, Cloud Access, and top-notch Data Security have Business owners consider it as the first choice for their financial software.

Share with us your experience in creating QuickBooks Sales Reports. Let us know in the comments section below!