Building Quickbooks Sales Reports: Made Easy

For a business to grow successfully, continuous tracking of important Business metrics such as Expenses, Profit & Loss, Total Sales, etc., is immensely crucial. Among these, a Sales Report is a key factor that helps you understand your company’s Revenue, Sales Team Performance, and Customer Base. Studying this data would help you understand the cash flow of your enterprise so that you can work on areas that require improvement for better growth. As customers grow, the data associated with them like contact details, orders, etc. also increases. Manually Accounting for this exponentially increasing data can be a challenge and requires a smart automation tool.

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.

Table of Contents

• Understanding QuickBooks
  • Key Features of QuickBooks
  • Standard Quickbooks Sales Reports
• Steps to Generate Top 3 QuickBooks Sales Reports for Businesses 
  • Monthly Sales Report
  • Gross Sales Report
  • Sales By State Report
• Limitations of Quickbooks Sales Reports
• Conclusion

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.

Key Features of QuickBooks

QuickBooks has come up with some of the smartest features in the Financial Software Market. Let us look at the salient attributes offered by QuickBooks below:

• Computing Taxes: The “Tax Center” feature calculates all the Sales Taxes accurately for your firm. It also allows you to set filing frequency and add custom tax rates.
• Remote Access: With Cloud Accounting offered through QuickBooks Online, you can access your Quickbooks Account and check on your company’s progress from anywhere, anytime and from your phone, laptop, or any other device.
• Invoicing: You get to create and design your own Custom Invoices and Professional Sales Receipts that you can send in no time.
• Data Security: QuickBooks has a top-notch Data policy providing Bank-Level Security ensuring that your Data is always guarded and accessible to you.
• Multiple Users: With different levels of access, you can grant permissions to users from various departments to increase collaboration among teams.
• Reports and Dashboards: Interactive dashboards along with a plethora of Standard Reports available in Quickbooks lets you check on the Business Performance instantly.
• Free Support: An effective and unlimited free support by the Quickbooks Support Team is always there to answer your queries and solve any problems related to Accounting for your business.

For more information on the features, you can visit the Official QuickBooks Website.

Now, let’s understand the default QuickBooks Sales Reports present in the Software.

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.

To know more on how to customize your reports, click here.

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.

Although, there are a few drawbacks associated with Quickbooks. As a business advances, it attracts more customers, and the data generated related to Transactions, Customer Details, and Products increases at an exponential rate. On average, different departments altogether use at least 10 applications. Manually Integrating all that data from different data sources with Quickbooks is a monotonous task and may require some of your Engineering Bandwidth which rather can be better employed on other important business activities. You can overcome all these obstacles by using a Cloud-Based ETL tool like Hevo Data.

Hevo, a No-code Data Pipeline can help you transfer and integrate your data from different Data Sources like QuickBooks into a Data Warehouse or a Destination of your choice. It is a fully automated and secure platform that doesn’t require you to write any code!

Hevo with its strong integration with 100+ sources & BI tools (Including 40+ Free Sources) such as QuickBooks allows you to not only export data from your desired data sources & load it to the destination of your choice, but also transform & enrich your data to make it analysis-ready so that you can focus on your key business needs and perform insightful analysis using BI tools. 

Want to visualize your Sales data with ease? Try Hevo today and Sign Up for a free 14 day Trial !. You can check out the Pricing Details here to select a plan according to your needs. 

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