Among the differences between QuickBooks Online (QBO) and QuickBooks Desktop is the way reports are customized. Let’s create a basic profit and loss report and then add a percent of income column.
We start by navigating to the Reports section. You can find that link in the blue, left-hand panel.
Choosing the All Reports selection allows us access to all of the standard QBO reports. Profit and Loss will be in the Business Overview section.
Making this selection brings up a plain, basic profit and loss report. Percentages would make it so much more meaningful.
To do that, we select the Customize button.
The Customize Window makes available a number of refinements that can be added to most reports. These are categorized along the left side of the window. General, Rows/Columns, Lists, Numbers, and Header/Footer are all areas of the report where custom settings are possible.
For our example, we selected Rows/Columns. We want to add a percent column to our profit and loss.
The second arrow in the screenshot shows the setting, a simple checkbox, that will add the column to our report.
Once we select the Run Report button, QBO re-creates the profit and loss report. You can see the customized report in the above graphic.
In a day-to-day setting using QBO, this enhancement of the profit and loss took only a minute. Still, if this is the way we prefer to view this report, we may not want to have to customize it each and every time we view it.
In order to streamline the process then, we can save the custom work we have done. We do that by selecting the Save Customizations button.
By default, this action will suggest the existing report name as the new name for the custom report. In order to make it clear, we have added “with Percent” to the report name.
There are two more options QBO gives us.
Add this report to a group if you have a group of reports that are regularly emailed to others.
The other setting allows you to make this report available to all users on your QBO account as a custom report on their list too. Or, leaving the box unchecked puts the report title into your list of custom reports only.
In the future, you can select the Profit and Loss with Percent from the My Custom Reports section of Reports.
Hector Garcia, CPA
Certified Advanced QuickBooks ProAdvisor
12401 Orange Drive #136
Davie, FL 33330
954-414-1524
hector@garciacpa.com
