This isn’t overly difficult, but you should understand your options.
QuickBooks’ built-in lists and reports are quite capable, and can be very useful to your company in their own right. But QuickBooks was designed to have a good relationship with Excel, which can be used to calculate, display and manipulate data in far more sophisticated ways.
For this reason, you should have a solid understanding of how the two interact with each other. If you’re going to be working between the two programs extensively, you should probably take a QuickBooks training course.
Let’s look at one of the more basic transfers between QuickBooks and Excel: exporting a customer list. You first need to define which customers you want to include. Maybe you want to do some collections work, for example, so you only want customers who have overdue invoices.
Open the Customer Center and make sure that the Customers & Jobs tab is highlighted. Click on the arrow to the right of All Customers. This menu opens:
You can export your entire customer list to Excel or just a subset.
Select Customers with Overdue Invoices. The left vertical pane will change, displaying a list of only the customers that fall in that category.
If you know that that will be a rather large group and you want to divide it up so multiple employees can follow up, you would click Custom Filter. In the field next to Search, you’d select Search Within Results. Enter your state abbreviation (the way it appears in your customer records) next to the For label, and then click the arrow next to In and select State. It should look like this:
You can set up a custom filter to further narrow down your customer list
Click Go to work with your targeted list. (You can use these tools anytime you need to look at a group of customers that share specific characteristics.)
Now you’re ready to export the list you created into Excel. Click on the arrow next to the Excel button in the Customer Center’s toolbar.
Select Export Customer List. You’ll see this window:
You’ll have several options when you’re exporting a customer list into Excel.
Make sure that Create new worksheet…in new workbook is selected (though there are other directions you could go here). Click the Advanced button if you want to specify formatting guidelines for your spreadsheet.
When you’re ready, click Export. Excel will open, and a new worksheet will now contain your data. Be sure to save it.
That’s the simplest Excel export from QuickBooks. If you want to work with the other options in the Export window, QuickBooks training is probably in order.
