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About this lesson

In this lesson, we learn how to drill down into the detail behind the balance sheet, and various ways to modify the report.

Quick reference

Balance Sheet modification

The balance sheet can tell us about the health of our business. We can modify this in various ways to answer questions we might have or to see trends.

When to use

The balance sheet is used to view a snapshot of the cash on hand (this includes bank accounts), the money owed to the business and the money that the business owes. Watching your cash and knowing the trends as it pertains to cash is important because a business could be profitable but not have enough cash to be sustainable. Modifying the balance sheet will allow you to see historical data and spot trends.

Instructions

View multiple periods side by side:

  • Open the balance sheet report
  • Scroll up so that the light gray box appears.
  • Just under report period, change the dropdown from 'total only' to say 'months'. 
  • Click run report

Remove the cents:

  • In the upper right corner, click on the gray button called customize
  • Check the box next to 'without cents'
  • Click run report

Rename the report:

  • In the upper right corner, click on the gray button called customize
  • Scroll down to the section called header/footer and expand this section
  • Change the text in the field to the right of report title
  • Click run report

Hints & tips

  • You can customize the report by adjusting the settings that are displayed on the main report page in the light gray box
  • You can customize the report in additional ways by clicking the gray button in the upper right hand corner that says customize
  • Feel free to customize the report in as many ways as you'd like. This report is for you and if you really want [insert customization here], you should do that!
  • Don't forget to save customizations if you find a format for your report that you really like and want to see again 
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  • 00:04 In this video, I want to talk to you about modifications to the balance sheet report.
  • 00:09 First, let's go to the balance sheet.
  • 00:10 On the left-hand side of your screen,
  • 00:13 I'll have you click on Reports and then navigate to Balance Sheet.
  • 00:20 As a reminder, the balance sheet is as of a given date.
  • 00:24 It's not a range of dates.
  • 00:25 One of the things you can do,
  • 00:27 however, is you can say I'd like to see a range of dates.
  • 00:31 Let's click on this Display columns by, and change it from Totals Only to Months.
  • 00:37 Then over to the right, we'll click on Run report.
  • 00:42 What we can see is what's happening with our accounts month over month.
  • 00:47 So for example, and
  • 00:48 we're really having some issues with our checking account here.
  • 00:52 Our checking account was negative $4,000 in January, and
  • 00:56 then it goes to negative $11,000 in February.
  • 01:00 It stays there for a while before dipping even further, and
  • 01:03 then finally coming back out of the hole in August.
  • 01:06 In your real QuickBooks,
  • 01:07 hopefully you don't see trends like I have in my example QuickBooks.
  • 01:11 What I like about this though,
  • 01:12 is I can kind of see what's happening with my money.
  • 01:15 Sometimes I might want to compare my profit and loss with my balance sheet.
  • 01:19 Because maybe I can see, okay, I've sold stuff but it takes a couple weeks or
  • 01:23 a month for the money to come in.
  • 01:25 And then I can see it showing up on the balance sheet.
  • 01:29 I also like using this as a gauge to see, how much money do I spend?
  • 01:34 I know how much money I collect, right, because I've got my my net income or
  • 01:38 main net loss.
  • 01:39 But what's my bank balance look like?
  • 01:41 Is it trending up over time?
  • 01:43 Or in this case, is it trending down over time?
  • 01:46 There's just a handful of things that I think is really useful about looking at
  • 01:49 this.
  • 01:50 You can scroll down, you can do the same thing.
  • 01:52 Just look at your trends for your credit card.
  • 01:55 How are you doing on the balance?
  • 01:56 Is it creeping up, is it creeping down?
  • 01:59 So I think you have a good sense on that.
  • 02:01 I'm going to change this back to the Totals Only view.
  • 02:05 Let me show you some other stuff you can do.
  • 02:07 You can compare previous periods.
  • 02:10 So a lot of this is just like what we did on the profit and loss.
  • 02:13 You can say, show me my changes period over period.
  • 02:17 So here I can see, how am I doing this year versus last year?
  • 02:21 The answer is I'm doing pretty good,
  • 02:23 because last year I didn't have a business.
  • 02:26 Apparently, my racing school didn't start until sometime this summer.
  • 02:30 So that's a thing you can compare.
  • 02:33 Let me go back to the Reports.
  • 02:35 So I want to show you a different report that's set up in the default reports.
  • 02:39 If we click on Reports on the left-hand side, in the upper right-hand corner,
  • 02:44 it says Find by report name.
  • 02:46 And I can say, balance sheet.
  • 02:48 I can see the Balance Sheet Comparison, the Balance Sheet Detail, and
  • 02:52 the Balance Sheet Summary.
  • 02:53 Let's just take a brief look at each of these, the Balance Sheet Comparison first.
  • 02:59 That's what we just looked at.
  • 03:04 The Balance Sheet Detail,
  • 03:05 detail always means show me the detail behind the numbers.
  • 03:10 So this, much like some of the other reports we've seen,
  • 03:13 it kind of stretches off to the right.
  • 03:15 I can use the gray bar on the bottom of my screen to see what's left over there.
  • 03:20 I can also click the little gear in the upper right-hand corner, and
  • 03:23 select some things if I want to be able to see everything without needing to
  • 03:27 scoot side to side.
  • 03:35 And then the third one we wanted to look at, the Balance Sheet Summary.
  • 03:38 The Balance Sheet Summary is like the standard balance sheet we started with.
  • 03:45 The difference is your accounts are collapsed up into the summary.
  • 03:50 So what I mean by that is the Bank Accounts here,
  • 03:52 it's one bank account, right?
  • 03:54 It's just called Bank Accounts, and it has a balance of 6500.
  • 03:58 Let me pull up the regular balance sheet, the one we looked at to start with.
  • 04:04 When I look at the Bank Accounts, I can see that it is a total of 6500.
  • 04:09 But the way that comes to be is because I have a checking account and
  • 04:12 I have petty cash.
  • 04:13 So when you look at the summary, it's the same thing as clicking this little arrow
  • 04:16 to the right, and collapsing it.
  • 04:20 So there it is.
  • 04:22 So it might be helpful for you if your balance sheet goes on and
  • 04:24 it's kind of lengthy.
  • 04:26 And maybe you just want to see a snapshot, like how much money do I have in the bank?
  • 04:30 Or if you're thinking about your credit cards,
  • 04:32 how much money do I owe to my credit card companies?
  • 04:34 It's just a different view of the same information.
  • 04:38 There's no right or wrong.
  • 04:39 The purpose behind this is just to give you information.
  • 04:42 So you can find the report that makes the most sense to you, so
  • 04:45 you'll look forward to looking at your reports.

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