Recently one of the QuickBooks forums posed a question concerning how to produce from QuickBooks Desktop some type of Z-out report similar to those that QuickBooks POS produces. After several users suggested different reports that didn’t quite ‘do the trick’, I jumped in an offered up a report that I discovered when working on a shopping-cart integration.
This report works well if you have either a single source of ‘cash transactions’ or multiple sources. In the case outlined we will assume a single ‘cash drawer’ and User entering ‘Sales Receipts’ from a QuickBooks desktop workstation.
There are a lot of Reports in QuickBooks Desktop that Intuit has ‘hard coded’ with certain information and formatting, as a result you have limited ability to change a lot of these reports even if you do understand the concepts of ‘source’ and ‘target’ records. Several years ago while developing a course on ‘basic reporting’ for QuickBooks I came across the fact that you many times have to start with a report that seems absolutely wrong for what you want to do, but by the time you have selected, filtered, sorted and formatted the report it is exactly what you need.
As I said I originally developed this report for a client who was using QuickBooks Desktop at their sales counter, they simply didn’t want to spend the funds to install a POS system, but needed a way to balance their cash drawer each day.
Preparing the Report:
Step 1 – From the QuickBooks menu, select Lists.
Step 2 – Under the Customer & Vendor Profile List menu item, select the Payment Method List.
Starting a Z-out Report
Step 3 - At the bottom of the Payment Method List, click the Reports drop-down arrow to open and select the QuickReport. As shown above. (Note the Report will be a QuickReport for whatever Payment Method was highlighted in the list at the time clicked Reports.) QuickBooks will generate a Payment Method report like the one shown below.
Z-out Report Before Customizing
Step 4 – Select the option to Customize Report, and then under the Display Tab select the Date Range as ‘Today’.
Step 5 – From the Customize Report window, choose the Filters tab under the current filter the Payment Type needs to be changed to ‘All payment methods’.
Step 6 – With the Customize Report window still open, make an additional change on the Filters tab. Select ‘Transaction Type’ in the Filter scrolling window, then select ‘Sales Receipts’ as the Transaction Type option. (Note: This report is limited to cash-drawer transactions.)
Z-Out Report Custom Filters
Step 7 – Click ‘OK’ to save your customization. Your new report should look like the one below:
Z-Out Report
[Note: You may need to filter this report by 'Rep' if you are assigning an unique User to handle a cash drawer, or you may want to filter the report by 'Class' if you are segregating registers using Class.]
As you can see, this report shows all the sales ‘by detail’ as negative amounts under the heading of 'No payment method', it then shows the sales paid as positive amounts under each Payment Method used during the day's transactions. The report should always ‘Zero-out’ (Z-out) at the end of each day.
It is easy to use this report to balance the various ‘credit cards’ against their respective totals on your end-of-day Merchant Account tape to insure you balance on a ‘credit basis’. You should be able to balance the actual cash drawer ‘cash items’ (cash and checks) by taking the Beginning Cash Drawer Balance, and Adding the Cash and Check amounts on the report, and then confirming that equals the Ending Cash Balance. If the drawer is off, then there has been an unrecorded ‘take from the till’.
If you have clients processing a cash-drawer via QuickBooks Desktop, this report should help to Z-out.