# QuickBooks Comparative Reports Are Out of Account Order? Restore It in Google Sheets

You run a comparative Profit and Loss or Balance Sheet and the account order falls apart. Accounts with no activity in the current period, but activity in the column you are comparing against, get pushed to the bottom of their section and sorted by amount rather than by account number or name. Every section has to be re-sorted by hand before the report can go to anyone, and it happens again next month.

## Why this happens in QuickBooks

The comparative reports build the row order from the current period first and append the remaining accounts afterward. There is no report setting that forces a single sort across the whole section, so the accounts that only appear in the comparison column land out of sequence. On a numbered chart of accounts this is immediately visible, because the numbers stop ascending partway down each section.

Sorting is the one thing a spreadsheet is unambiguously better at. Once the report is in Sheets as data, the order is yours to set and it survives every refresh.

## How to solve it

### 1. Pull the comparative report into Sheets

Bring the Profit and Loss or Balance Sheet in with its comparison columns using Retriever. Rows arrive as data rather than a formatted export, which is what makes sorting possible at all.

### 2. Include the account number column

With account numbers present you have an unambiguous sort key. Without them you are sorting on account name, which puts accounts in alphabetical rather than statement order.

### 3. Sort each section by account number

Apply the sort within each section so income, cost of goods sold, and expenses stay in their own blocks. A helper column marking the section keeps a single sort from mixing them together.

### 4. Let the sort re-apply on refresh

Because the layout tab references the pulled data rather than containing it, a refresh brings new figures into an order you already defined. There is no re-sorting each month.

## FAQ

### Why are accounts out of order on my QuickBooks comparative report?

Accounts with no activity in the current period but activity in the comparison period are appended after the accounts that do have current activity, and ordered by amount. The result is a section that stops following account order partway down.

### Can I force QuickBooks to sort a report by account number?

Reports can display account numbers and some allow sorting on a column, but there is no setting that holds a numerical sort across a comparative report where accounts appear in only one of the periods.

### Does this affect the Balance Sheet as well as the Profit and Loss?

Yes. Any comparative report where an account has activity in one period and not the other can show the same reordering, which is why it is most noticeable on year-over-year comparisons.

### Will the sort hold when accounts are added?

Yes, if the sort is on the account number column rather than a fixed row range. A new account arrives in the pulled data and sorts into position on the next refresh.