As a business owner, you want to view key information often and easily. My favorite is still the company snapshot. You can view your account balances, accounts payable, accounts receivable, income and expense trends, top customers, top products / services (items), reminders, pie charts for income or expense breakdown, and more. If you hover over the chart, you will see the actual dollar amount. There are a total of 12 different tables / charts / lists that you can include in the snapshot. Not only can you choose which ones you see, but you can arrange them any way you want by dragging the boxes. You can also choose date ranges for your sales reports from the drop-down menu (custom is not an option).

The company snapshot can be on your toolbar (mine is) or you can click Company> Company Snapshot.

1. To choose what to see in your snapshot, click Add content

• While you can choose from 12 different charts, you will only see 4 at a time. The plus of Add means that you can add it, and the Added mark means that it is already in your snapshot.

2. Once you have selected your content, you can place the mouse pointer on the title bar and move it.

3. Place the mouse pointer on a bar on a chart to see the actual dollar amount.

4. Accounts payable and receivable overdue are shown in red so you can quickly differentiate

5. While in the Company Snapshot, you can click on Customers and see the different customers: see how long they have been customers, how fast / slow they pay, the best-selling products / services.

Another way to help you monitor your accounts receivable is to look at the average payday, found in the Customer and Accounts Receivable reports in QuickBooks. The Summary report shows how long your customer pays you on average AND the overall average number of pay days across all of your customers. This allows you to see who is really slow (maybe you want to drop or load them differently) and if you need to be more proactive in your collections.

For other reports that you want to see frequently, there are two methods that I like.

1. Place the report you want to view directly on the toolbar, so that it is just one click away.

• Save the report, then click View> Add “Name of your report”.

2. Run one group of reports at a time. I do this monthly and quarterly; you may also want reports to monitor inventory or monitor jobs and review completed jobs.

• Create a group:
• Report> Memorized reports> Save report list
• At the bottom of the list, click Memorized Report> New Group and name your group
• When you memorize your report, select Save to memorized report group and select your group
• Then you can run your group of reports by simply clicking Reports> Stored Reports and selecting your group. All reports will run, much faster than ever!

While QuickBooks doesn’t have exception reports per se, there are a few ways to get exception reports.

• If the exception can be expressed as a percentage (that is, if it goes above or below a certain percentage), in many of the QuickBooks reports, you can choose to display a percentage column, so you can quickly see if there are some exceptions. percentages. In some reports, you can even sort them by percentage.
• Depending on the exception, you may want your accountant to review some reports and notify you when there is an exception. That doesn’t remove your responsibility for all reporting, but it can help you with some of your workload.
• If you use Enterprise, you can take advantage of Q-ODBC for some custom reports.
• Some third-party dashboard and reporting software may be able to provide you with some of these metrics.

Whatever you choose, the idea is to know what you want to monitor and develop a system so that you can easily and routinely monitor what you consider important.