QuickBooks Reports: How to Run Reports in QuickBooks Online

Last updated August 2026.

All QuickBooks Online reports live behind Reports in the left navigation, split across three tabs: Standard for the reports Intuit ships, Custom reports for the ones you have saved, and Management reports for branded packages. QuickBooks Desktop keeps the same library under the Reports menu, grouped by area such as Company & Financial, Customers & Receivables and Vendors & Payables.

There are well over a hundred reports in there and you will use about eight of them. This guide covers those eight, the two settings that change what every report says, how to save a customized version so you never rebuild it, and why report numbers sometimes move between one run and the next.

Which QuickBooks financial reports actually matter?

Four financial statements and four operational reports carry almost all the weight. The four statements tell you how the business is doing. The four operational reports tell you whether the statements can be trusted, which is the part most people skip.

Run them in that order at month end. The Profit and Loss and Balance Sheet are what you look at; the trial balance, general ledger and reconciliation report are what prove the first two are right.

Where are reports in QuickBooks Online?

Select Reports in the left navigation. The Standard tab lists everything Intuit ships, grouped under headings such as Favorites, Business overview, Who owes you, Sales and customers, What you owe, Expenses and vendors, Sales tax, Employees and For my accountant. A search box at the top finds any report by name.

Two habits make the page much faster to work with. Star the reports you run every month and they move to Favorites at the top. Save any report you have customized and it lands on the Custom reports tab, ready to open with its filters intact.

The report group headings are worth learning because they tell you what QuickBooks thinks a report is for. Anything under For my accountant is a checking tool rather than a management report, which is a useful sorting rule when you are hunting for something and cannot remember the name.

How do I run a report in QuickBooks Online?

Open the report, set the Report period, set the Accounting method to cash or accrual, then select Run report. Those two settings decide almost everything a financial report says, and getting them wrong is the single most common reason a report looks unfamiliar.

1. Select Reports, then the report name.
2. Set Report period. The presets cover this and last month, quarter and year, and Custom takes exact dates.
3. Set Accounting method. Cash counts money when it moves, accrual counts it when it is earned or owed.
4. Use Display columns by to break the report into months, quarters, classes, locations or customers.
5. Select Run report, then click any figure to see the transactions behind it.

The drill down in step five is the most underused feature in QuickBooks reporting. Every number on a summary report is a link, and clicking it opens the transaction list that produced it. From there you can open the original transaction and fix it, which turns a report from something you read into something you correct.

What is the difference between cash and accrual on a QuickBooks report?

Cash basis counts income when payment arrives and expenses when you pay. Accrual counts income when you invoice and expenses when the bill is dated. QuickBooks stores every transaction once and simply presents it either way, so switching the toggle changes the report without changing your books.

Unpaid invoices are the clearest illustration. On accrual they are income the day you send them. On cash they are invisible until the customer pays. A business with sixty thousand dollars of open invoices will see a materially different QuickBooks profit and loss statement depending on which toggle is set, and both versions are correct answers to different questions.

Two exceptions to know. Journal entries show on both cash and accrual reports in QuickBooks Online, because there is no invoice or payment attached for QuickBooks to defer. And the Statement of Cash Flows is built on accrual data by design, since its job is to reconcile accrual net income back to the change in cash.

How do I customize and save a report in QuickBooks Online?

Select Customize, change the period, columns, filters and header, then save it. In the modern reports experience you use Save as and name the report; in the classic view the same action is Save customization. Saved reports appear on the Custom reports tab, where they can be grouped, shared with other users and emailed on a schedule.

The customizations worth saving are the ones you would otherwise rebuild every month:

• A Profit and Loss with columns by month and a previous year comparison.
• A Profit and Loss filtered to one class, location or property.
• An expense report filtered to a single vendor or account for a review meeting.
• An A/R Aging Detail limited to invoices over sixty days.

Grouping saved reports matters more than it sounds. Put a client's month end package in one group and QuickBooks will email the whole group on a schedule, which is how firms deliver monthly reporting without anyone opening the file. If those statements then need to go to a board or a lender in a polished format, running the export through a tool that turns a bookkeeping export into presentation ready financial statements saves rebuilding the layout by hand each month.

How do I export QuickBooks reports to Excel or PDF?

Use the export icons in the report toolbar. QuickBooks Online exports any report to Excel or PDF and can email it directly. QuickBooks Desktop uses Excel > Create New Worksheet > Export for a spreadsheet and the Print button for a PDF.

Choose the format by what happens next. PDF for anyone who needs figures fixed to the date you ran them, such as a lender, an SBA package or a board pack. Excel for anyone who will rework the numbers.

Be aware that the Excel export reproduces the report layout, complete with merged cells and subtotal formulas, so it opens looking like the report rather than like clean data. When you need rows you can pivot, export a detail report instead of a summary and build your own totals.

What is changing with QuickBooks Online reports in 2026?

Intuit is retiring the classic reporting view. Standard reports now open in the modern experience by default, the option to switch back to classic is being removed, and saved classic customizations are migrating in batches. Intuit has described the rollout as phased, so what you see depends on your company file.

The figures are unchanged; the controls around them moved. If a step in an older tutorial does not match your screen, look for the same setting under a different label rather than assuming the feature was dropped. Report period, accounting method and Display columns by all still exist.

It is worth opening every saved report you depend on and checking that its filters survived. A customization that quietly lost a class filter still runs, still looks right, and reports on the whole company instead of the one segment you meant.

Why do my QuickBooks reports show the wrong numbers?

Usually the report is right and something underneath it is not. In order of how often it happens: the accounting method is set to the basis you did not want, the date range is off, a saved filter is excluding transactions, someone edited a prior period, or transactions are missing from QuickBooks entirely.

The fourth row is the expensive one, because nothing on the report says data is missing. A bank feed that stopped in March produces a clean looking report that understates half the year. Running the Profit and Loss with columns by month exposes it in seconds: a month of real trading with almost no expenses is not a good month, it is a gap. The QuickBooks audit log covers the third row, and missing bank transactions covers the fourth.

Frequently asked questions

How many reports does QuickBooks Online have?

It depends on your subscription. Simple Start includes a basic set, Essentials and Plus add progressively more, and Advanced adds a custom report builder and Spreadsheet Sync. Every plan includes the core financial statements: Profit and Loss, Balance Sheet, Statement of Cash Flows and Trial Balance.

Can I schedule QuickBooks reports to email automatically?

Yes, for saved custom reports. Open the Custom reports tab, set a schedule on a report or a report group, and QuickBooks emails it on that cadence with the data refreshed. Standard reports cannot be scheduled until you save a customized copy of them first.

What is the difference between a summary and a detail report in QuickBooks?

A summary report shows one line per account with a total. A detail report lists every transaction inside each account. Summary reports are for reading, detail reports are for checking and for sending to an accountant who has asked what is actually inside a category.

Why do my QuickBooks reports not match my bank balance?

Because the Profit and Loss is not a cash report. Loan principal, owner draws, credit card payments, transfers and asset purchases all move cash without touching it, and unpaid invoices move it without touching cash. Use the Statement of Cash Flows when you need the two to reconcile.

Can I run QuickBooks reports for a closed or disconnected bank account?

Only for the transactions already in QuickBooks. If months were never imported, they are absent from every report with nothing to flag it. Convert the PDF statements for those months into a Web Connect .qbo file, import them, categorize the rows, and the reports fill in.

Where is the Reports menu in QuickBooks Desktop?

On the top menu bar. Reports opens a submenu grouped by area: Company & Financial holds the Profit and Loss and Balance Sheet, Accountant & Taxes holds the trial balance, general ledger and journal, and Banking holds the reconciliation reports. Report Center gives the same library with previews.

Getting reports you can actually trust

A report is only as complete as the transactions behind it, and the usual hole is bank data that never arrived. Feeds reach back a limited window when first connected, they break when a bank changes its login, and a closed account cannot be connected at all. None of that shows up on the report itself.

Reconcile every bank and credit card account through the end of the period before you run anything you plan to act on. If months are missing, convert those PDF statements to a .qbo file, import them, categorize the For review list, then reconcile. After that the Profit and Loss, the Balance Sheet and the trial balance are all describing the same complete set of facts, which is the entire point of running them.

Related reading: the QuickBooks profit and loss statement, the QuickBooks trial balance, the QuickBooks general ledger, the QuickBooks month end close and reconciling bank statements in QuickBooks.