3 More QuickBooks Reports Worth Running Every Month

Your Profit & Loss and Balance Sheet are the two reports most small business owners need to be in conversation with regularly. They tell you how your business performed and where it stands.

But there are a handful of other reports in QuickBooks Online that also earn their keep when you run them every month. They tend to be more operational than the P&L and Balance Sheet (less "is the business healthy?" and more "what's currently happening that needs my attention?"), and they each bring to light a specific kind of issue you'd otherwise miss.

Here are three I'd run every month, what they show, and what to actually do with what you find.

1. A/R Aging Summary

Accounts Receivable (A/R) is the money your clients owe you for work you've done but haven't been paid for yet. The A/R Aging Summary shows you exactly who owes what, broken down by how overdue each invoice is.

To find it: Click Reports in the left sidebar, then search for "A/R Aging Summary" or find it under Who owes you.

What you'll see: A list of every client with an unpaid invoice, sorted into columns by how overdue: current, 1-30 days late, 31-60, 61-90, and 90+. Each row tells you at a glance who owes you, how much, and how long they've been sitting on it.

What to do with it: For invoices 1-14 days late, send a friendly reminder. For 30+ days late, send a firmer one. For chronic late-payers in the 60-90 column, the question shifts from "how do I get paid faster" to "do I want to keep working with this client, and if so, on what terms?"

I covered the deeper version of this in How to Track Unpaid Invoices in QuickBooks Online. The short version: if you invoice clients, this report needs to be part of your monthly rhythm.

2. A/P Aging Summary

The Accounts Payable counterpart to the A/R Aging. This report shows you who you owe money to and when those payments are due.

To find it: Reports, search "A/P Aging Summary" or find it under What you owe.

What you'll see: A list of every vendor with an outstanding bill, sorted by how close to (or past) due they are. Same column structure as A/R: current, 1-30 overdue, 31-60, 61-90, 90+.

What to do with it: Three things. First, make sure you're not letting bills get past due, since some vendors charge late fees and others will start to pull access (a software subscription that gets cut off, a contractor who stops accepting new work). Second, see if you have any bills you'd forgotten about, which happens more than you'd think when bills come in by email and don't go through a centralized inbox. Third, if you're managing cash flow tightly, the A/P Aging tells you what's coming due so you can plan accordingly.

If most of your business expenses are paid by credit card or auto-debit and you don't really have many "bills" sitting unpaid, this report will be short or empty, and that's fine. It's most useful if you have vendors who invoice you on terms.

3. Sales by Customer Summary

This one shows you how much revenue each client has generated over a given period.

To find it: Reports, search "Sales by Customer Summary." You can change the date range to see this month, this quarter, this year, or any custom period.

What you'll see: A table with each client's name and their total sales for the period, usually sorted highest to lowest by default.

What to do with it: This is a useful report for several different decisions, depending on what you're paying attention to that month.

Concentration risk. If one or two clients make up most of your revenue, that's worth knowing. Losing a client who represents 5% of your income is annoying. Losing one who represents 40% is a crisis. The Sales by Customer report makes that visible so you're not surprised by it.

Pricing and packaging decisions. If you're considering raising rates, this report shows you who'd be affected and by how much. It also surfaces clients you may have inherited at older, lower rates and never updated.

Time spent vs. revenue earned. Cross-reference your highest-revenue clients with your time. If your second-biggest client takes triple the time of your biggest client, you're effectively paying yourself less for that work. Worth knowing before you decide who to take more or less of.

Repeat vs. one-time mix. Over a longer period (a full year, say), the report tells you how much of your revenue comes from repeat clients vs. one-time. Useful for thinking about marketing and retention.

A note about cash flow reports

You might notice I didn't include a cash flow report on this list. QBO has a Statement of Cash Flows report, and it's useful in the right situations, but for most very small service businesses it's overkill on a monthly basis. If your business is simple enough that your cash position roughly matches your bank balance, the Cash Flow Statement isn't telling you much new. If your business is complex enough to need it (significant accounts receivable, accounts payable, inventory, debt), then it's worth running, and you probably already have a bookkeeper handling it.

If you're not sure whether you need it, the answer is probably no, and you can revisit when something about your situation changes.

A monthly rhythm for all of these

If you're running these reports as part of your monthly close-out (which I covered in A Step-by-Step Month-End Bookkeeping Routine), the whole thing fits in about fifteen minutes once you're in the rhythm. Pull each one, scan it, note anything that needs follow-up, move on.

If pulling and reading these every month sounds like more than you want on your plate, that's part of what an ongoing bookkeeping engagement covers. Book a free call if you'd like to talk about what handing this off looks like.