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In QuickBooks, the Accountant & Taxes menu appears when you choose the Reports --> Accountant & Taxes command. Hidden on this submenu are almost a dozen menu commands and reports that are particularly interesting and useful to accountants. The following list identifies these reports:
Trial Balance: The Trial Balance menu command produces, of course, a Trial Balance Report as of a particular date.
General Ledger: The General Ledger menu command produces a report that simply lists the accounts in your Chart of Accounts and then changes the account for the month or year or whatever accounting period that you specify.
Transaction Detail by Account: This menu command produces the report that you would expect: A list of the transactions that affect a particular account.
Journal: The Journal menu command produces a report that lists transactions by transaction type and number.
Audit Trail: The Audit Trail Report is pretty important for accountants — particularly when an accountant is concerned or worried that transactions have changed when they should not have changed. The Audit Trail Report lists transactions by the person entering the transactions. The Audit Trail Report also lists changes to transactions and identifies who made the changes. You need to turn on the Audit Trail feature. If it's important for you to know who is doing what, the Audit Trail Report provides the answer.
Closing Date Exception Report: If you finalize the accounting data for the year (referred to as "closing the books") — and you should — the Closing Date Exception Report identifies changes to closed transactions.
Transaction List By Date: The Transaction List By Date Report lists transactions in order of date of entry.
Account Listing: The Account Listing Report lists all of the accounts on your Chart of Accounts. The report also gives the account balance and indicates which line on your tax return that the account gets reported on.
Income Tax Preparation: The Income Tax Preparation Report shows on which lines of which tax forms that account balances get reported.
Income Tax Summary: The Income Tax Summary Report uses your income tax preparation data to show what amounts should be reported on what lines of your tax forms. For example, if you are a sole proprietor filing a Schedule C tax form, QuickBooks looks at all the accounts that you use to track gross receipts or sales. Then it totals the balances in those accounts and shows the actual value that should be reported on the gross receipts or sales line of your Schedule C tax form.
Income Tax Detail: The Income Tax Detail Report gives the same information as the Income Tax Summary Report — except that this report shows the individual accounts that get bunched together to produce the tax line total.
Some versions of QuickBooks, such as QuickBooks Premier, include a Reports --> Expert Analysis command. If you choose the Reports --> Expert Analysis command, QuickBooks displays the Expert Analysis submenu. The Expert Analysis submenu provides another set of menu commands that let you display income statements and balance sheets that compare one month's data to the previous month's data, or one quarter's data to the previous quarter's data, or one year's data to the previous year's data.
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