If you micromanage one thing in QuickBooks Online, let it be your accounts receivable.
QuickBooks Online’s dashboard is an essential tool for mid-market retail, field services, and manufacturing companies seeking real-time insights into their financial health. With its user-friendly interface, businesses can easily track key metrics, manage cash flow, and stay on top of receivables—all from one central location. In this guide, we’ll focus on navigating the three main tabs—Home, Cash Flow, and Planner—that streamline invoice tracking, financial forecasting, and cash flow planning. Learn how to leverage the dashboard to optimize your accounting processes and drive business growth.
Maximizing Your Use of the QBO Dashboard for Financial Clarity
QuickBooks Online’s Dashboard consists of three elements, accessible by clicking tabs. Home is just what it sounds like: a central hub for the most important numbers in your company file. We’d like you to pay special attention to the Income widget (block of data). It gives you an abbreviated look at your open and overdue invoices and your incoming payments over the last 30 days.
TIP: Click the Customize layout bar if you want to move these widgets around to make them more prominent.
You can customize QuickBooks Online’s Home page to prioritize the widgets you want displayed most prominently.
Click the next tab, Cash flow, and scroll down to MONEY IN. Here, you’ll see the current month’s Upcoming and Paid invoices in a graph, and a list of Overdue and Open invoices. You can create and view invoices here, too, and see a cash flow chart at the top of the page that extends six months into the future and past.
The Planner tab opens the more comprehensive Cash flow planner, displaying a 1-24 month interactive graphic based on transactions you’ve already entered in QuickBooks Online (they’re listed below). You can toggle between Money in/out and Cash balance. On both, you can move your cursor on the chart to see details from individual days and months. You can edit future transactions and add them to see what impact those actions would have on your cash flow.
This does not change your QuickBooks Online data. It’s merely for demonstration purposes. You could see what would happen to your future cash flow if, for example, you planned to make a major purchase or expected to receive an influx of revenue.
Leverage the Sales Page for Efficient Invoice and Cash Flow Management
The Sales page is your home base for checking on your outstanding cash. Hover over Sales in the toolbar and select All sales. This page provides a visual display of the status of your invoices as they travel through QuickBooks Online. Colored bars represent the five stages in the process: Estimates, Unbilled income, Overdue invoices, Open invoices and credits, and Recently paid.
Each shows you the dollar amount involved and sometimes the number of transactions, allowing you to instantly see what needs to progress and which customers might benefit from a nudge to pay. Click any of these, and the list of related transactions appears below.
QuickBooks Online’s Sales tools help you see at a glance where your money is tied up.
The list is interactive. That is, there’s an Action column at the end of each row that tells you what your action options are for that particular transaction. For example, for Unbilled income, you can View/Edit, View activity, and Create invoice. If you see unexpected values or amounts here, you may need to go back to the originating expense and unclick "billable" status (ask us for help if you need it. We see people make this mistake all the time!). You can also print the list and export it to Excel.
Unlocking Deeper Understanding of Cashflow and Receivables Insights with Detailed Reporting
To gain a deeper understanding of who owes you money, run detailed reports in QuickBooks Online. Click Reports in the toolbar and scroll to the Who owes you section. Here, you’ll find a variety of pre-formatted reports that can be customized to suit your needs. We recommend running these reports regularly, although the frequency will depend on the volume of business you do.
The A/R Aging Summary report, for example, shows which customers have current balances and which are overdue by 1-30, 31-60, 61-90, or 91+ days. You can customize this report further by selecting options like Report period, Aging method, and Days per aging period. Other key reports include Open Invoices, Unbilled Time, Unbilled Charges, and Customer Balance Summary, which collectively provide a comprehensive view of your receivables.
There are other fundamental financial reports available to you, such as the Statement of Cash Flows, Profit and Loss, and Balance Sheet. These reports are crucial for assessing your overall financial health and should be generated monthly or quarterly. We can assist you in running and analyzing these reports to ensure you have a complete understanding of your financial status.
How We Can Help
From the dashboard’s real-time insights to detailed reports on overdue invoices and receivables, QuickBooks Online can help you take control of your financial health. If your business is facing cash flow challenges or you need assistance with maximizing the potential of QuickBooks Online, our expert team is here to help. Contact us today to learn how we can support your accounting infrastructure needs and improve your financial forecasting to better sustain your business operations and help propel your business forward.
Comments