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QBAR Initial Set-up
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Donovan Sachs; Alembic Computer Services, Inc.
QBAR
A new Advanced Reporting folder is created in the same directory as your QuickBooks® , and files are created to store the data in.
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Donovan Sachs; Alembic Computer Services, Inc.
QBAR - Start from Scratch
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Donovan Sachs; Alembic Computer Services, Inc.
QQBAR - A/R Aging Dashboard
QBAR also has the ability to create dashboards and Intuit gives us one to get us started and it is an A/R Aging Dashboard.
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Donovan Sachs; Alembic Computer Services, Inc.
QBAR - List boxes
There are set lists boxes that can simply be double clicked to add them to the report, along with tables, charts and text fields
In the article I wrote back in April I mentioned the new reporting tool that was entering the world of advanced reporting know as QuickBooks® Advanced Reporting or QBAR. It is now here and available for all Enterprise users with an active Full Service Plan. There will not be an additional fee for the feature but if you don’t have a current FSP then you won’t have access. If users want to use the new feature all they have to do is call support and ask for it to be added to their license.
This article is based on features found in version 1.4, the latest version available at this time; it could be that there might be some slight changes or modifications by the time you receive the feature.
The first thing I want to point out is that, most likely, the other reporting tools found in Enterprise are not going away any time soon. We will continue to have the read version of FLEXquarters QODBC driver and the Custom Advanced Reporting tool. However I do believe the various tools might add confusion to our conversations when talking about QuickBooks® custom reporting. To help eliminate any confusion let’s refer to the tools by their shorter names, QODBC, CAR and QBAR.
Now for more on QBAR, the new feature associated with QuickBooks Enterprise V15. It is the latest custom reporting tool produced by Intuit. It can be accessed from the Reporting menu in QuickBooks® after is has been added to your license. One of the goals with this tool was to open up all of the fields in QuickBooks® and give users the ability to add virtually any field to any report. No longer will we have to go into a canned QuickBooks report and hope to add a new field only to find that the chosen report doesn’t even have access to the field we are looking for. Unlike CAR, in QBAR all of the data is properly linked so users don’t have to understand how relational databases work and how the data tables need to be linked to get to all of the data.
QBAR is written on the QlikView platform. I have not been able to dive deep into the QlikView technology but I have learned that it is a very flexible and powerful tool and with time one can learn how to make the most of it. Users will be able to make modifications to the base reports with a minor learning curve, but to take full advantage of the power of this tool you will need to know and understand how QlikView works. These are things we can go into in later articles as I plan to try and keep this one at a higher level. At this point just know that this tool can be used by the end user but for those that offer custom reporting services there is still work for you with QBAR.
Before opening this new tool be sure that you are in Multi-User mode as this is a requirement for using the tool. Often we are plagued with the message boxes telling us to switch to single-user mode in order to accomplish a specific task but not in this case.
When you launch QBAR for the first time it must go through an initial setup that has 141 steps (see image 1 above). Don’t panic, these are all automatic and there is nothing you have to do for these to be completed, except wait. “How long?” you might ask. That all depends on the size of your QuickBooks® file. This could take a couple of minutes to over an hour. In testing, a QuickBooks® demo file loaded in a few minutes but a 730MB file took just under an hour to load. This setup process is actually creating the QBAR structure and syncing your data. Yes, you read that right, this is not what I would call direct access to your data like CAR but a syncing process more like you see with QODBC or maybe QQube. A new Advanced Reporting folder is created in the same directory as your QuickBooks® , and files are created to store the data in (see image 2). This means that when you add new information into QuickBooks® QBAR must refresh in order to report on that data. When you open QBAR you will be asked if you would like to refresh the data or used the last loaded data. Whether you want to refresh could depend on the data you are looking for or how quickly you need the report.
Since my last article there have been big improvements to the overall tool in both performance and reporting capability. In my original article there were only 8 canned or starter reports and now there are 10 reports plus an Aging Dashboard and a Start from Scratch option (see image 3). The starter reports are A/R Aging Summary, A/R Aging Detail, Deposit Detail, Sales by Item Detail, Customer List, Job Profitability Summary, Job Estimates vs. Actual Detail, Inventory Valuation Detail, Profit & Loss by Job and Inventory Stock Status by Item Reports. QBAR also has the ability to create dashboards and Intuit gives us one to get us started and it is an A/R Aging Dashboard (see image 4). Finally the Start from Scratch option is just that, the ability to start a report from scratch and this option will require some learning before you’re able to really take advantage of it.
As I mentioned, the changing of the canned reports is rather easy and will have a minor learning curve. There are set lists boxes that can simply be double clicked to add them to the report, along with tables, charts and text fields (see image 5). Once the report has been setup just the way you like it you can export the results to Excel with a single click, you can also print and share your creation just as easily. Much like sharing a memorized report, you can create a report file, send it to anyone else running QBAR and they can import into their file. This is great for those that create reports for their customer and what to share it with them. You don’t have to do the work on their system and they don’t have to have a special report viewer.
Overall I think QBAR will be a very useful and powerful tool for those that learn how to take full advantage of all it has to offer.
This has been a very high level overview of what QBAR has to offer. Over time I will write additional articles on how QBAR works from the simple customizations, to standard reports, and creating reports from scratch.