Is QuickBooks Reporting Sufficient For Your Business?

Where Quickbooks Falls Short

QuickBooks Online is a great accounting system but is less than impressive when it comes to financial reporting, especially for fast growing businesses. You may already be pushing the limits of QuickBooks for your reporting and budgeting needs. Do you often find yourself exporting reports to Excel and spending hours transforming the data? Are you creating budgets in Excel spreadsheets with 20+ tabs?

Even though QuickBooks comes with dozens of reports and lets you create custom reports, there are shortcomings that can limit your ability to properly manage your business, such as:

• Reports that do not give you access to all the data.
• Excel exports that require a lot of manual transformation to fit your company’s unique reporting needs.
• An inability to create customizable dashboards or add graphs to reports.

How can you unlock your QuickBooks data? Your options are:

• Query the QuickBooks API to extract the data you need, or
• Use a tool (e.g.,. Stitch, FiveTran) to extract the data

For most Finance professionals, using a tool to extract data will be the obvious choice. For a small monthly fee, you don’t need to worry about any of the technical details of the QuickBooks’ API.

Some things to consider before extracting data using a tool:

• In what format will the tool provide your data? Most tools will give you the option to get your data as JSON or CSV files.
• Does the tool support full table replication or only export new and updated transactions? The documentation will usually list which method(s) is available for each table. Depending on your needs, either method will work.
• What destinations are supported? Be sure they can send your data to a data warehousing solution such as Snowflake, BigQuery or Redshift so you don’t have to worry about moving your data repeatedly.

Once You’re Connected

Below is a list of tables that are generated when you export QuickBooks data to Snowflake. Each of these tables has nested objects which leads to additional tables. That’s quite a few tables!

ACCOUNTS, BILLPAYMENTS, BILLS, CLASSES, CREDITMEMOS, CUSTOMERS, DEPARTMENTS, DEPOSITS, EMPLOYEES, ESTIMATES, INVOICES, ITEMS, JOURNALENTRIES, PAYMENTMETHODS, PAYMENTS, PURCHASES, REFUNDRECEIPTS, SALESRECEIPTS, TERMS, TIMEACTIVITIES, VENDORCREDITS, VENDORS

We recommend creating unique views (or tables) for your Income Statement and Balance Sheet data. You can then connect to the data using Excel or your business intelligence tool. This allows you to quickly create customized reports and dashboards that are not natively available in QuickBooks.

Here’s a preview of a revenue dashboard created from the Income Statement view. This gives you a high level overview of the metrics that are most important to you while also allowing you to drill down to the individual transactions.

Interested in doing more with your Quickbooks data? FutureView can help. Fill out the form below to learn more about our reporting and planning tools, purpose-built for the Quickbooks-driven enterprise.

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