Q:

Subject: Quickbooks question

Hi,

 

I found your email addresss on your webpage of Quickbooks tips, and have a question that maybe you can answer for me. 

I've just started a new job at a church, doing their daily bookkeeping.  They use Quickbooks, mainly only for checkbook and payroll.   There's a report that they use for their monthly business meetings that they have set up in Excel, and I'm hoping to be able to set up or modify a Quickbooks report that will give them what they need instead.

  

Currently what happens is this: they print a payroll summary and a  P&L for the previous month, check the checkbook balance at previous month-end, and print the detail out of another account, then combine all of these (adding and subtracting accounts) into the Excel spreadsheet.  The main problem they seem to have with not just using the P&L from Quickbooks is that it separates out income and expenses, instead of just showing a current balance for each of those accounts. For example, contributions/re-imbursements come in during the month for mission trips, cds, church activities, etc., and then those have to be subtracted from the expense accounts for whatever particular fund was reimbursed to be shown on their report -- the expense shown on the report reflects what was spent AFTER the re-imbursements to that account. 

I can't find a report in Quickbooks that will show the funds in this way.  Any ideas?

 

Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

A:

Too many people take the unnecessary extra step of sending QB reports out to Excel to produce reports that can be prepared directly from within QB.

The odds of finding a preset report in QB that will fit your needs exactly are slim.  However, it shouldn't take too much adjusting, filtering and fine-tuning of a basic transaction report to arrive at what you need.  Once you have it the way you need it, memorize the report and you can then fire it up with one click.

I don't have to time to walk you through the fine-tuning steps you will need to design your report.  One thing you may want to take a look at is how reimbursements are posted into QB in order to give you the best info.  For example, you can produce different kinds of reports if the reimbursements are posted back into the original expense accounts versus having the reimbursements posted to their own separate income or contra-expense accounts.

I'm sure if you can get the church's governing board members to specify exactly what they want to be able to see in a monthly report, you should be able to tweak the QB reports to get just what they need.

Good luck.

Kerry Kerstetter

 

- posted by Kerry M. Kerstetter, MBA~CPA~ATP~ATA @ 7/23/2006 08:29:00 PM Send this post: