In QuickBooks 2010, the Report Center has three ways to view the reports in a category. You can choose the one you want to use, depending on your preference and your computer’s horsepower:

Figure 21-1. When you use the Grid View and click a report category, small thumbnails and report titles for that category appear. When you click a report thumbnail, the current date range and several icons appear below the report as shown here. The tabs at the top of the window make it easy to get to the reports you use most often: memorized reports (Memorizing Reports), reports you designate as your favorites (Running Reports), and the ones you’ve run recently.

When you select a report in the Report Center, you’ll see the date range for the report and icons for performing report-related tasks:

In QuickBooks 2010, the Report Center initially displays its built-in reports and the categories to which they belong. However, the Center also offers quick access to reports that you run often:

Intuit gives you three places to transform reports into files. The Print Reports dialog box has an option to create ASCII text files, tab-delimited files, and comma-delimited files. But you can also create comma-delimited files and Excel workbooks by choosing Export in any report window. (The comma-delimited files that you create in both dialog boxes are identical, so you can generate them whichever way you prefer.) Your third option is to print forms or reports as .pdf files.

Figure 21-4. In the Select Memorized Reports From drop-down list, you can choose a memorized group of reports to have QuickBooks automatically select all the reports in that memorized group. To streamline Process Multiple Reports, create a memorized group (Running Reports) for each collection of reports you process and call it something like EndofMonth or EndofQuarter. Then, in the Process Multiple Reports dialog box, you can select the entry for the memorized group of reports and print them all at once.

Here are the three ways you can create files for reports and the differences between them:

Different reports call for different date ranges. Financial statements typically use fiscal periods, such as the last fiscal quarter or the current fiscal year. But many companies manage month by month, so sales reports often cover the current month or month to date. Payroll reports span whatever period you use for payroll, whether that’s one week, two weeks, or a calendar month. And tax reports depend on the tax periods required by the tax agencies you answer to.

The best place to choose the date range depends how much report modification you have in mind:

QuickBooks has two dozen preset date ranges that work based on today’s date. For example, if it’s June 15, 2010 and your company uses the calendar year as its fiscal year, This Fiscal Year represents January 1 through December 31, 2010, but Today is simply 6/15/2010. And, if none of these date ranges do what you want, in the report window toolbar, you can set specific start and end dates in the From and To boxes.

The preset date ranges are numerous because they mix and match several types of date ranges.

Many of QuickBooks’ built-in reports calculate subtotals. For instance, Profit & Loss summary reports include subtotals by income, cost of goods sold, expenses, and so on. Sales reports by customer subtotal the sales for all the jobs you do for a customer.

When you create a detailed report, such as “Sales by Customer Detail”, the report shows every transaction for that report, and you can subtotal the results in any way that makes sense for that type of report, as shown in Figure 21-7.

Depending on the report you pick, some choices in the “Total by” drop-down list are more appropriate than others. For example, you might decide to subtotal a sales report by Customer Type, Rep, or the Account list to see which types of customer provide the most business, which sales rep makes the most sales, or which income account pulls in the most money. Subtotaling a sales report by Workman’s Comp Code doesn’t make any sense—and QuickBooks isn’t subtle about saying so: The report displays a zero balance and no rows of data.

Figure 21-7. When you run a report with transaction details, QuickBooks picks a category for subtotals. For example, the “Sales by Customer Detail” report starts with sales subtotaled by customer. To change the subtotal category, in the report window, click Modify Report, and in the “Total by” box, choose another field, like Class or “Customer type”.

Some reports start with only one column, but they don’t have to stay that way. Depending on the type of report, you can change the columns that appear in several ways like showing columns for each time period or choosing fields to display in separate columns. Then, if you find that your appetite for columns is larger than your computer screen, you can remove, resize, and reorder the columns.

Adding and removing columns in summary reports

As you manage your business, you’ll want to see results for different date ranges in the reports you generate. For example, during a year, you might create a Profit & Loss report to show your financial status by month, for each fiscal quarter, and for the entire year. If the report window toolbar includes a Columns drop-down list (which it does for summary-type reports), choosing an entry there is the quickest way to change the categories that columns represent (see Figure 21-8). You can make the same choices in the Modify Report dialog box using the “Display columns by” drop-down list.

The Modify Report dialog box provides different comparison checkboxes for each type of report. For example, when you click Modify Report for a Profit & Loss report, you’ll find additional checkboxes to compare results to the previous period, previous year, or the year to date, and to show dollar and percentage comparisons. If you want to focus on the percentage difference between budget and actual values, then turn off the “$ Difference” checkbox.

Figure 21-8. In the report window toolbar, the Columns drop-down list sets the categories for the columns in your report—basically, subtotaling by column. When you choose Quarter, the report changes from a single year-long total to columns that subtotal each fiscal quarter (as shown here). In the Columns drop-down list, choose another type of category like Class or Customer:Job to slice results up differently. Choosing Class makes QuickBooks include a column for each class you use.

The Profit & Loss Modify Report dialog box even includes checkboxes for “% of Column”, “% of Row”, “% of Income”, and “% of Expense”. If you generate a Profit & Loss report by quarter and turn on the “% of Row” checkbox, the report shows each quarter’s performance as a percentage of the full year’s results.

Resizing and moving columns

Some columns seem to use more room than they need, while others truncate their contents. Figure 21-10 shows you how to resize columns or rearrange the order in which they appear.

Figure 21-9. For a detail report, the Display tab in the Modify Report dialog box includes a list of fields you can choose to include as columns in the report. If a field is preceded by a checkmark, click the field to remove it from the report. If there’s no checkmark, click the field to add it.

QuickBooks’ built-in reports come pre-sorted, but the order is rarely obvious. When you first generate a report, the Sort By box is set to Default, which means different things for different reports. For example, if you create a “Sales by Customer Detail” report, QuickBooks groups the transactions by customer, but it sorts the transactions for each customer from earliest to most recent. (Unlike Excel, QuickBooks sorts by only one field at a time.)

Figure 21-10. Top: Any report that has more than one column also has a small diamond between each column heading. If you mouse over the diamond, it turns into a two-headed arrow. Drag to the right to make the column wider, or to the left to make the column narrower. A Resize Columns dialog box asks if you want to set all the columns to the same size. Click Yes to resize all the columns. Click No to resize only the one. Bottom: In detail and list reports, when you position the mouse pointer over a column heading, it turns into a hand icon to indicate that you can move the column to another location. As you drag, the pointer shows both the hand icon and the name of the column. And, when you get close to the left side of a column, a red arrow appears to show where the program will move the column if you release the mouse button (shown here). Drag the diamond out of the window to remove the column from the report.

The fields you can use to sort depend on the report. For the “Sales by Customer Summary” report, you can choose from only two columns to sort by. The Sort By box includes Default and Total. Default sorts the report by customer name in alphabetical order. Total sorts the report by the total sales for each customer, from the smallest to largest dollar amount. On the other hand, the “Sales by Customer Detail” report includes several columns of information, and you can sort by any of them.

If a report is sortable, in the report window toolbar, you’ll see the Sort By box. In the Sort By drop-down list, choose the column to use to sort the report. As soon as you change the Sort By box to something other than Default, the Ascending/ Descending button appears to the right of the Sort By box. (It has the letters A and Z on the left and a blue arrow that points down when the sort order is descending and up when the sort order is ascending.) Clicking this button toggles between sorting in ascending and descending order.

Detail reports (the ones that list individual transactions) usually show more information than you want. For example, a “Purchases by Item Detail” report could run page after page, listing your weekly purchases of Turtle Chow. Filtering a report removes transactions that don’t meet your criteria, so you can home in on just the Turtle Chow purchases from Myrtle’s Turtle Mart.

In QuickBooks, you can apply as many filters as you want at the same time. Each filter adds one more test that a transaction has to pass to appear in your report. For example, when you set the date range for a report, what you’re really doing is adding a filter that restricts transactions to the ones that happened between the starting and ending dates. Then, if you want to find the sales for only your corporate customers, you can add a filter based on the Customer Type field.

QuickBooks provides dozens of filters, from the most common, such as dates, items, and transaction types, to the less useful, such as Workmen’s Comp Codes and FOB (that’s “free on board,” discussed on Sales & Customers).

Built-in reports already have filters, but you can customize a built-in report by adding extra filters or editing or removing the existing filters. Here are the steps:

Figure 21-11. When you choose a field in the Choose Filter list, the criteria for that field appear. If you’re not sure what a field and its criteria settings do, click “Tell me more” to open the QuickBooks Help window to the topic about that filter.

You don’t have complete control over what appears in report headers and footers, but you can choose from several fields common to all of them. For example, fields like Company Name, Report Title, and Date Prepared are options for a header, and page number is one option for footers. To change the header and footer contents for the report you’re working on, in the Modify Report dialog box, click the Header/Footer tab.

QuickBooks pulls data from your company file to automatically fill in the header and footer text boxes. For example, if you use a built-in “Sales by Customer Detail” report, the program fills in the Report Title box with—you guessed it—“Sales by Customer Detail”. If you have a more eloquent title for the report, type it in the box.

The Show Footer Information section provides the Extra Footer Line box for typing whatever you want. The text appears in the bottom-left corner of the report page. This text isn’t associated with any field in QuickBooks, so it’s blank unless you type something.

The last checkbox in both the Show Header Information and Show Footer Information sections controls the pages on which the headers and footers appear. To conserve paper, turn off the “Print header on pages after first page” checkbox so QuickBooks includes the header on the first page only. If you want to omit the page number on the first page, turn off the “Print footer on first page” checkbox.

The right side of the Header/Footer tab is the Page Layout section, which lets you position header and footer fields to a very limited extent, as shown in Figure 21-12.

Figure 21-12. If you want to realign the header and footer contents, in the Alignment drop-down list, choose Left, Right, Centered, or Standard. QuickBooks chooses Standard automatically, which centers the Company name and title; places the date, time, and report basis (Cash basis or Accrual basis) on the left; and puts the extra line and page number in the left and right corners of the footer.

The fonts you use or the way you display numbers doesn’t change the underlying financial message, but an attractive and easy-to-read report can make a good impression. Just like the fields that appear in the header and footer, you can set QuickBooks’ preferences to assign the same font and number formats for all your reports.

On the other hand, changing fonts directly in a report is quick, and has the added advantage of letting you see exactly what the report looks like with the new formatting, as Figure 21-13 shows.

Figure 21-13. Right-click the text you want to format like a row label, a column label, or values. Change the format in the dialog box that opens. Other than the dialog box title—which tells you which report element you’re formatting—the choices are the same for every element. When you click OK, QuickBooks opens a Changing Font box that asks if you want to change all related fonts. If you click No, it changes the font for only the report element you chose. If you click Yes, it changes related elements, often the entire report. If you don’t like the format, right-click the text and try something else.

If you already have the Modify Report dialog box open, click the Fonts & Numbers tab. The Fonts section on the left side of the tab lists the different text elements in your report, such as Column Labels, Company Name, and Transactions. To change a font, select a text element and click Change Font, which opens the same dialog box you get when you right-click the element in the report.

The right side of the Fonts & Numbers tab has options for changing the appearance of numbers. Negative numbers are usually a curse in the financial world, so accountants use several methods to make them stand out. If you’re not sure which style of negative number you like, choose an option and check the number in the Example area. In QuickBooks, you can choose among three ways to show negative numbers:

To make big numbers easier to read, in the Show All Numbers section, turn on the “Divided by 1000” checkbox. This removes one trio of zeros from numbers, so that $350,000,000 shows up as $350,000 in a report. And, if a report tends to contain mostly zero values, you can keep the report lean by turning on the “Except zero amounts” checkbox. Turn on the Without Cents checkbox to show only whole dollars.

Whether you export one report or an entire group, QuickBooks stores the report settings in a single file with a .qbr file extension (for “QuickBooks report”). Because report templates are meant to move between QuickBooks company files, you don’t have to specify any more than the reports you want to export and the file to which you want to export them:

Importing reports from a template file is even easier than exporting reports. In the Memorized Report List window (choose Reports → Memorized Reports → Memorized Report List), click Memorized Report, and then choose Import Template. QuickBooks opens the Select File to Import dialog box with the “Files of type” box set to “QuickBooks Reports Files (*.QBR)”. All you have to do is navigate to the folder that contains the report template file and double-click the filename (or select the filename and then click Open).

Depending on whether you’re importing one report or a group, QuickBooks opens a different dialog box: