How to drill down on a Profit and Loss by Customer

You can now drill into a cell on a Profit and Loss, Balance Sheet, or Cash Flow when the columns are customers, classes, locations, or vendors. Previously, it worked only with date columns. Drill down also works on Budget vs. Actualswhen you select a cell in an Actual column.

If you've ever run a P&L by Customer, you already know the layout: accounts down the left, one column per customer, a dollar amount at each intersection. Until now, Retriever's drill-down treated those columns as periods, so a click on "Cooler Cars" had nothing to work with. Select that same cell today, hit Refresh, and you get the invoices that make up the number.

How to drill down

1. Open a supported report

   Use a Profit and Loss, Balance Sheet, Cash Flow, or Budget vs. Actuals whose Display columns by is set to Customers, Vendors, Classes, or Departments/Locations. On Budget vs. Actuals, select a cell in an Actual column. Reports you already created this way work as they are. You don't need to rebuild them.

2. Select the cell

   Click the intersection of an account (or a section total like Total Income) and a customer, class, location, or vendor column. In the example below, that's Design income for Cooler Cars.

3. Refresh drill-down

   Open Retriever, go to the Drill down tab, and click Refresh. Retriever pulls live QuickBooks transactions for that account and that column, over the report's date range.

That's the same select-then-Refresh flow as a P&L by month. The only change is that the column can be a name instead of a period.

What you see

The grid is the transaction list behind that cell. Date, transaction type, number, name, memo, and amount are visible by default. Use Columns to show Location, Vendor, Split, Balance, or Account, and Filters to narrow the list.

The footer is the total for the selection. On a Profit and Loss or Cash Flow that's period activity, so it should match the cell. On a Balance Sheet it includes beginning balance, so it matches the ending-balance cell.

The date range is the report's range (Last Fiscal Year in the screenshot), not a column period, because these columns aren't dates. Accounting method and any other filters on the report stay in place.

Parent columns vs Total columns

QuickBooks often prints two columns for a parent customer, class, or location:

• Cooler Cars is that customer's own activity. Jobs and sub-customers are left out.
• Total Cooler Cars is the parent plus every job and sub-customer under it.

Click the column that matches the number you want to inspect. The far-right Total column drills the whole report: every entity in the report's filters, for the full date range.

What you can click, and what you can't

This works on individual accounts, account totals, and real section totals such as Total Income, Total Expenses, or Total Current Assets. On Budget vs. Actuals, it works on Actual columns only.

Does not work on calculated rows (Gross Profit, Net Income), Total Equity on the Balance Sheet (it includes Net Income), or the Not Specified column. QuickBooks can't filter a General Ledger by unassigned transactions, so pick a named column instead.

Frequently asked questions

See also