Remember what a nightmare this was to do manually? QuickBooks makes information about your receivables readily available.
You know how important it is that your company maintains a positive cash flow. There are two sides to that critical equation – income and expenses – and QuickBooks provides very capable tools to track both of them.
Let’s look at incoming funds and how you can keep a close watch on what’s owed you. QuickBooks provides 14 reports for this purpose. Each comes in a boilerplate form, but they can become much more insightful and focuses when you customize them, which is a skill you can learn in a QuickBooks training course.
QuickBooks Receivables Reports
Once you learn how to use QuickBooks reports, you’ll know right away which of these reports will give you the information you need.
Take a look at the Reports menu to see what’s available here. Select Customers & Receivables from the menu and you’ll see this list:
The QuickBooks Customers & Receivables reports list, as seen in QuickBooks 2013.
- A/R Aging Summary
- A/R Aging Detail
These two reports tell you how old your outstanding invoices are. The standard report format has a column titled Aging that displays the number of days that have passed since the payment was due. Hopefully, you won’t see a lot of numbers here. QuickBooks breaks the past due dates down into 1-30 days, 31-60, 61-90 and 90+. As their names imply, one lists all invoices in the date range and the other summarizes by Customer/Job.
- Customer Balance Summary
- Customer Balance Detail
How much does each customer owe you? These reports answer that question. The detailed report breaks the total amount down by its contributing transactions, while the summary option just gives totals by Customer/Job.
- Open Invoices
This is a tremendously helpful report, whether you have an A/R specialist or you’re running QuickBooks on your own. You can see at a glance which invoices haven’t been paid. Aging and Due Date are included for each.
Who needs to be contacted about past due invoices? This report will tell you. Need help with this uncomfortable task? A QuickBooks class should be able to help.
- Collections Report
Designed to help whoever in your company makes collection calls, the report not only shows overdue invoices and statement charges by customer, but it also lists contact names and phone numbers.
- Average Days to Pay Summary
- Average Days to Pay
How fast are your customers remitting payment? You can learn that easily by accessing these reports. One lists averages by customer while the other breaks it out into individual transactions.
- Accounts Receivable Graph
Sometimes it helps you grasp a situation if you can visualize the data. One of the graphs here illustrates the total your customers owe you currently and also breaks it down into 30, 60 and 90+ days, while the other displays outstanding balances by customer. The graph is interactive; you can click on segments to see more detail.
- Unbilled Costs by Job
This report gives you instant insight into what has yet to be billed for individual jobs.
This report will remind you of work done but not yet billed.
- Transaction List by Customer
- Customer Phone List
- Customer Contact List
- Item Price List
All of the data contained in these lists is available elsewhere in QuickBooks, but you sometimes have occasion to see related information in a list format.
