Business Analysis with QuickBooks®

Chapter 2. Exporting Data from QuickBooks

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Exporting Reports to Excel Workbooks

• Formatting and Layout Problems

• Exporting to Text Files

• Analyzing QuickBooks Data with Pivot Tables

To bring a broader array of tools to bear on the data you've entered into QuickBooks, you really need some straightforward ways to make the data available to other applications. Although QuickBooks has various methods you can use to carry out business analysis without leaving its comfortable and familiar user interface, you just can't do it all in QuickBooks. Sometimes you need to send it out.

Exporting Reports to Excel Workbooks

One method you can use to get data from QuickBooks into another application is the export of a report. To export a QuickBooks report is to make its data available to another application such as Excel. As you'll see in this chapter, the information in a report can be placed in an Excel worksheet where you can analyze the data more fully than is possible in QuickBooks.

The very nature of most QuickBooks reports is to summarize data. Even the detail reports have data summaries that provide totals and subtotals for their detail lines.

The summaries can be helpful because they classify values that otherwise you'd have to deal with yourself: COGS (cost of goods sold) versus office supplies, for example. At the same time the summaries can create problems because they often roll up, and therefore repeat, information already in the report in the form of details. Much of the knowledge ...