QuickBooks 2011: The Missing Manual

Customizing Reports

The report window is teeming with ways to customize reports. Some tools are easy to spot like the buttons and drop-down lists at the top of the window. But you can also drag and right-click elements in a report to make smaller changes. This section describes all the techniques you can use to make a report exactly what you want.

Here’s where you go to customize a report:

• Run custom reports from the Reports menu. If you make it all the way through QuickBooks’ report categories without finding the report you want, don’t give up hope. The Reports menu includes two entries for building custom reports from scratch. Choose Custom Summary Report to build a report that displays subtotals by some kinds of categories. For instance, you could customize a summary report to create an income statement for all customers of a particular type. The Custom Transaction Detail Report entry, on the other hand, lets you customize transaction reports to show exactly the fields you want.

  As soon as you choose one of these custom report entries, QuickBooks opens both the report window and the Modify Report dialog box—because a custom report needs some kind of customization. You can set up the contents and appearance of the report any way you want, as shown in Figure 21-6. For a custom transaction report, the Modify Report dialog box includes a list of fields that you can turn on and off, as well as checkboxes for specifying how you want to sort and total the results.

  Figure 21-6. In ...