Every business — from a one-person sole proprietorship to a growing partnership or corporation — runs on two financial statements: the Balance Sheet and the Profit & Loss (Income Statement). Knowing how to read them is one thing. Knowing how to build, customize, and analyze them inside QuickBooks Online 2026 is what separates a confident bookkeeper from someone who just runs the default report and hopes for the best.
This course walks you through the full lifecycle of working with QuickBooks Online's financial statement reports. You'll start by understanding the structure of the Balance Sheet — what assets, liabilities, and equity actually represent, how QuickBooks categorizes accounts differently from traditional textbook accounting (and why that matters for external reporting), and how the double-entry accounting system ties the Balance Sheet and P&L together through retained earnings. From there, you'll learn the report customization toolkit that applies across virtually every report in QuickBooks: filtering, number formatting, rounding, header and footer controls, column layouts, and the difference between point-in-time reports and timing reports.
The heart of the course is analysis. You'll build comparative reports from scratch — comparing months, quarters, and years side by side with dollar and percentage change columns (horizontal analysis). You'll create vertical analysis reports that show each line item as a percentage of total assets or total income, the same kind of ratio analysis used in professional financial review. You'll also work with the Summary Balance Sheet and learn when to present a high-level snapshot versus a fully expanded statement, including how each format behaves when exported to Excel.
Throughout the course translates between three different "languages" you'll encounter in your work: textbook accounting terminology, QuickBooks software terminology, and tax/CPA terminology. You'll also learn how to package these reports for different audiences — a business owner who wants the big picture, a CPA who wants accrual-correct external reporting, or a tax preparer who needs specific line items for the return.
Topics Covered
- Balance Sheet report overview — structure, layout, and how the double-entry accounting equation (Assets = Liabilities + Equity) is represented in QuickBooks Online
- QuickBooks vs. textbook accounting — why bank accounts, accounts receivable, undeposited funds, and opening balance equity behave differently from traditional financial statement presentation
- Equity by entity type — how owner's equity, partner capital accounts, and retained earnings differ across sole proprietorships, partnerships, and corporations
- Report formatting basics — the universal ribbon-style toolbar, point-in-time vs. timing reports, and how formatting carries across all QuickBooks reports
- Advanced report customization — filters (transaction type, name, account), number formatting (decimals, rounding, divide by 1,000, negative number display), show non-zero/active rows, header and footer editing, and section title editing
- Drilling down to source — using the date range on a Balance Sheet to control transaction detail when auditing accounts
- Comparative Balance Sheet creation (horizontal analysis) — building period-over-period comparisons across days, weeks, months, quarters, and years, including dollar change and percentage change columns
- Balance Sheet vertical analysis — using percentage-of-column to evaluate asset composition, liability load, and equity position as ratios of total assets
- Summary Balance Sheet — when to use a collapsed summary view versus the standard expanded view, and how each format exports to Excel
- P&L / Income Statement overview — revenue, cost of goods sold, gross profit, expenses, net income, and how the income statement tells the story of equity change over a period
- Comparative P&L (horizontal analysis) — multi-period income statement comparisons, including quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year performance review
- P&L vertical analysis — percentage-of-income, percentage-of-expense, percentage-of-row, and percentage-of-column ratios used to evaluate margin and cost structure
- Reporting for different audiences — how to package financial statements for business owners, CPAs/auditors, and tax preparers, and when to clean up QuickBooks formatting for external GAAP-style reporting
- Memorizing custom reports — saving customized comparative and vertical analysis reports for repeat use on monthly, quarterly, and annual cycles
