QuickBooks users rely on financial reports to get a complete view of their business. In addition to raw data, reports provide valuable insights into how a business is performing.
There are many types of financial reports. Each report serves a different purpose, giving small businesses broad and focused perspectives.
Learn more about Financial reporting basics.
A simple way to understand the many different types of financial reports is to think about what information appears on them.
Many reports focus on a specific area of a business: customers or vendors, sales, expenses, items and inventory, assets, and departments. And of course, users can run reports for specific financial accounts.
Two of the most common reports are the balance sheet and profit and loss report.
Balance sheet report
The balance sheet looks at everything a business owns. It provides a snapshot of a business’ total value (i.e. financial position) at a particular moment in time.
Balance sheets look at asset, liability, and equity accounts. This helps owners understand long-term trends.
Learn more about the BalanceSheet entity.
Profit and loss report
The profit and loss report (also known as the income statement) looks at the income from sales and expenses from day-to-day business operations. It summarizes a business’ performance at a particular moment in time.
Profit and Loss reports look at income and expense accounts. Its view is narrower than a balance sheet - it only looks at immediate income and expenses, not assets or liabilities. assets or liabilities.
Learn more about the ProfitAndLoss entity.
Each report analyzes financial data in a unique way. While there are common reports almost every business uses, some will find certain reports more useful than others.
QuickBooks Online users can customize most reports so they’re more useful. They can use filters, change the date range, and add data points to get a personalized perspective of their business.
Every business needs financial reports to understand how their business is doing and make smart decisions about their sales, expenses, assets, and everything else.
Financial reports will rely on existing item, customer, and transaction objects in QuickBooks to get data.
Visit the API Explorer to learn more about Report entities.
Before you get too far into development, set up the basic reporting implementation so you have pre-created entities to use.
Once you set up the implementation, you can start using report entities to generate and query reports.