How To Create a Balance Sheet in QuickBooks Online

hi this is Tim Yoder with fit small business today I'm going to teach you how to create a balance sheet in QuickBooks Online you can find all 46 of our free QuickBooks Online tutorials by Googling fit small business QuickBooks Online tutorials let's get started in your left menu bar within your QuickBooks account let's go to reports and now we're looking for our balance sheet so you can see that I already have my balance sheet marked as a favorite but let's find where it normally resides which is in the business overview box uh so you can see there are four different types of balance sheets the first three balance sheets are just customizations that QuickBooks has already made for you let's look at your basic balance sheet today now by clicking the star until it turns green that makes it a favorite so it'll appear in your favorites box as it does in mine so let's click balance sheet so the default balance sheet here is October 11th 2021 which is today's date uh you can see your balance sheet this provides details of all of your accounts for assets liabilities and equities we can set our basic uh options by scrolling above the balance sheet um so this is Paul's Plumbing here is a sample company U most of the transactions are dated in 2024 so I'm going to print a balance sheet for the custom period of 2024 so anytime you make changes to these options you need to click run report for them to take effect now you can see my balance sheet as of December 31st 2024 Most accountants are going to prefer uh a balance sheet to have both the beginning and ending numbers uh so these are our ending numbers to get the beginning numbers let's select period and previous year or previous period will provide the same thing okay if we want to we could have the change or the percent change let's just show the previous period again we have to click run report for it to take effect and there we go now we have our beginning balance sheet and our ending balance sheet great so other options that are available um we can right now we just have totals displaying for the period we could also do say quarters run report now we have our balance sheet on a quarterly basis um if we were going to do the quarterly basis I would probably so this is giving us the quarter and then the end of the prior quarter quarter end of the prior that's not really necessary right because this is March 31st is showing up twice so if we're going to do a quarterly report I would get rid of the previous period run report and there we go there's a nice quarterly report you could also do it monthly you can even do it daily if you wish okay um you can uh this you can choose to show your zero rows or not um I don't see any reason to so I show only the active rows and columns um I am going to change this back to totals only with the prior period okay and the last option here is very important so this is your accounting method acral accounting includes all of your accounts receivables and your accounts payable cash accounting only counts something as income when you actually receive the cash so an account receivable which is an outstanding invoice to one of your customers it's not income in the cash method until it's received under the acral method it's income as soon as you issue the invoice so right now we're under the acral method so if we look here we can see we do have accounts receivable and accounts payable showing up on our balance sheet well for most businesses for income tax purposes you need to use the cash method so QuickBooks is really nice and that it can actually print back balance sheets by either method so let's change this to our cash method run report and there our accounts receivable is gone our accounts payable is gone so we're now reporting on the cash basis okay so again most companies Cash basis is what they use for taxes acral basis is what they like to use for their management purposes because they'd like to see the accounts receivable how much money they expect to have coming in Okay so so those are the basic options there are a lot more options we can choose from if you click customize here it'll bring up a right menu with a lot of options these General options are mostly what we just went through but a few extras you can format your numbers here you can format how you want your negative numbers to show um rows and columns uh we actually adjusted this in our general options above the statement uh filter you can just do the balance sheet for first for certain customers and vendors and locations uh you can see where the location or class might be very helpful if you're not tracking now of course in order for the location and the class to be really relevant and meaningful you're going to need to track all of your locations by Lo all of your transactions by location in class and so if you Google our fit small business QuickBooks Online tutorials you'll find lessons where we teach you to set up the location and the class and then finally you have a few options for the headers and Footers um do it however you would like okay so those are all of your options um once you get all of your options set if you think this is exactly how you're going to want to see your report every time you can click save customization give it a name and click save okay I'm not going to do that here um actually I will let's just say balance sheet example and let's click save now when we go to our reports we will see in our custom reports we have a balance sheet example okay so once you get all your options set you can then Simply Save it so you don't have to set all your options again next time okay once you have your balance sheet exactly like you like it you have several ways to share it with people uh here you can email the balance sheet uh you can print the balance sheet or you can download the balance sheet so if you download the balance sheet you can do that as either an Excel file which you can then manipulate further or you can download it as a PDF file if you email it that will automatically email it as a PDF file and there you go that's how you create a balance sheet in QuickBooks Online I hope this was helpful and you have a great day thank you

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