How to get Gross Profit from an Invoice in QuickBooks

QuickBooks does not have a standard Profit by Invoice Report, or for that matter any information within an Invoice that will give you an indication as to how to tell what the profit in an invoice is.

However, there is a trick you can use to get that information.

Step 1, Open the desired Invoice:

Then Go to the Reports Tab (QB 2013 and 2014 Only) and click on Transaction Journal.  You can also hit CTRL+Y on the keyboard

This is going to take you to a standard transaction Journal report:

Step 2, Customize the Report to give you just the desired info:

• Filters Tab, Account: All Ordinary Income/COGS Accounts
• Display Tab, Add Balance on the Columns

Now on the last column at the very bottom you will get a running balance in negative, and that will be your gross profit.  A negative number is expected because Net Income (Retained Earnings) is a credit account.

And that is it.    It is important to measure that this only measures costs based in INVENTORY ITEMS, so the external costs of non-inventory items or services cannot be shown here.  For that you would need to use a Job Profitability report which is derived from JOB not from INVOICE.

On a Second Note, there is another approach to use which is to pull an Item Profitability Detail:

The Customize the Report, with these 2 filters:

• Transaction Type: Invoice
• Number: 7 to 7

But this will only work under the assumption that you never have Invoices with duplicated Invoice Numbers.  Also same exact situation arises based on the fact thta it will only mesure the avg. cost from Inventory items.

Hector Garcia, CPA
hector@garciacpa.com