How Manual QuickBooks Reporting is Costing You Money

Are you still entering your QuickBooks reporting manually? It’s a task that seems trivial at first, but it quickly eats into your profit margins. Deloitte reports that finance teams spent 48% of their time creating and updating reports.

Reporting is evolving quickly, and QBO, like many others, is adding artificial intelligence to reduce this manual time strain on your team.

Where Teams are Losing Money

Spreadsheets? They were once the go-to option for many teams, but they’re costing you money. Team members have to sift through spreadsheet after spreadsheet to find data that’s better in one central location. 

Better solutions for reporting exist, and your team realizes this already. But the problem is that even when processes have gaps, “they work.”

Spending nearly 50% of the time on reports that are cumbersome, rather than automating them, impacts your clients’ ability to use this data for data-driven insights.

How to Use QuickBooks Online to Automate Your Reports

If you’re a QBO user, there’s a good chance that there are a lot of QuickBooks Online features that you’re not as familiar with as you’d like to be. Reporting is one that we see clients overlook most often.

We’ll show you how to leverage these powerful features and even automatically email reports to make data-driven decisions.

How to Automate QuickBooks Reporting

QuickBooks Online automated reports are easy to set up:

• Go to Business overview > Reports
• Navigate to Custom reports
• Head to the Action column > Edit
• Tap Create schedule

You can now automate your reports. QuickBooks Desktop has a similar feature under Reports > Scheduled Reports > Schedule Setup.

Now, all you have to do is set up your reports and have them scheduled.

But how about customizing reports? Create an extra layer of efficiency with the help of the Report creation wizard. Go to Reports > Create new report and you’ll then select your desired report type from the list.

From here, you can add groups, select columns and design a report that matches your needs. Custom reports can also be edited just as easily, so feel free to start adding them into your workflow to begin saving time.

QuickBooks has an entire video on how to make your first custom report, which is perfect for visual learners who are reading this:

Prefer Spreadsheets and Have QBO Advanced?

QBO Advanced users have several custom report options, and one that a lot of teams prefer is the Spreadsheet Sync. What this feature does is allow you to collect all of your data from QBO and put it into a formatted spreadsheet with pivot tables to add segmentation.

For example, let’s assume that you want to create a Balance Sheet.

You would navigate to Reports and then Spreadsheet Sync.

Now, you can select from the many report templates that are premade by QuickBooks Online, such as:

• Balance sheet
• Profit & loss
• Trial balance
• Budget overview
• Statement of cash flows
• Numerous others

If you prefer spreadsheets or want to use some of the functionality that they offer, the spreadsheet sync option is one of the overlooked features we recommend. But keep in mind that you do need the Advanced version of QuickBooks Online to be able to access this feature.

What else can you do with QBP? How about setting up automated email reporting to give key stakeholders crucial, real-time information?

How to Automate Email Reporting in QuickBooks Online

Go into your QBO dashboard and navigate to the Reports tab. Navigate to the tabs up top and go to Custom Reports. Within this dashboard, you’ll find your custom reports, which are to the far right of the column that says Actions.

Click on the Actions link for the report you want to email and then:

• Tap Edit
• Toggle Set email schedule to On
• Adjust the recurrence settings
• Add the To email and the Subject line
• Customize your email body

If you want to attach the report to the email as an Excel file, you can select that on the screen.

Confused by how to do this?

Here’s a video straight from QuickBooks on how to automate your email reporting:

QuickBooks reporting makes your life easier and allows you to make data-driven decisions if used properly. For finance teams, the reduction in manual entry means that there’s more time to focus on higher-value tasks than basic reports.

Set these systems up, whether you’re working in an accounting department or running your own reports, and you’ll instantly reclaim valuable time.

To learn more about QuickBooks reporting or how we can help you with your accounting needs, schedule a consultation now!