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How to prepare QuickBooks financial statements

The beauty of QuickBooks is that you can create dozens of custom reports to help you better run your business. Beyond the basic three financial statements — profit and loss, balance sheet and cash flow statement — you can also customize reports by product, vendor, employee, bank or customer.

QuickBooks gives you flexibility as to how the statements are used and shared. You can view them in QuickBooks, email them to yourself or another member of the business or export them for later viewing. QuickBooks even lets you schedule financial reporting, so you can automatically receive and share updated financial statements on a periodic basis.

Here are the three main types of QuickBooks financial statements you can create:

1. QuickBooks profit and loss statement

Your profit and loss statement, also called an income statement, summarizes your business’s financial performance over a period of time — daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly or annually. It is an important document because it tells you the company’s biggest areas of expenditures and revenues.

The profit and loss statement lets you take advantage of opportunities that increase sales and trim back on expenses. You’ll want to review this statement more than once a year, and definitely before filing your small business taxes. You can run a standard profit and loss statement in QuickBooks or a profit and loss detail which shows year-to-date transactions for each income and expense account.

Here’s how to prepare your QuickBooks profit and loss statement:

From the home dashboard, select Reports on the left navigation bar:From the Report Center, you can either go to the Recommended tab or to All Reports > Business Overview, then choose Profit and Loss. (The Recommended tab is faster, but you’ll need to go to All Reports to get the Profit and Loss Detail). Just click on the report name or the link that says “Run” to open it.

Once it’s open, you can edit the date range or click Customize to make other changes to the report. For example, this where you can see the amount and percentage of profits coming from a specific product or customer. You can also customize the reporting time period here. If you just change the date directly without clicking the customize button, make sure you click the Run Report button to view the report for the new dates. Keep in mind that you can view the report in QuickBooks, email the report to yourself or someone else or export it as a new file.

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2. QuickBooks balance sheet

A balance sheet is a statement of the assets, liabilities and equity of a business — essentially a snapshot of your business value at a specific point in time. Balance sheet items are calculated by subtracting your liabilities — what you owe — from your assets, cash or property — what you’re own or is owed to you. The result is equity, or what