QuickBooks 2010 Company Snapshot
The Company Snapshot was a feature that was added in the 2009 release of QuickBooks. Very useful, but it had many limitations. With the 2010 release there is a significant upgrade to this feature.
Looking at the Company Snapshot in the 2009 program you had five “windows” of information. The ability to customize this was limited to a few parameters in some of the windows, and there was no way to print this other than doing a screen shot (like below).
Let’s take a look at a sample from QuickBooks 2010 (note – this is based on the beta version, so there might be slight variations):
Printing is a feature that has been requested often – now you can print the entire page, or an individual “widget” or graph.
Note the Add Content option at the top? Now you can choose from a list of 12 widgets that can be shown:
In the pre-release version I reviewed, the options are:
- Account Balances
- Previous Year Income Comparison
- Income Breakdown
- Previous Year Expense Comparison
- Best Selling Items
- Top Customers by Sales
- Income and Expense Trend
- Expense Breakdown
- Customers Who Owe Money
- Top Vendors by Expense
- Vendors to Pay
- Reminders
In addition to selecting the “widgets” that are included, you can rearrange them on the page by simply dragging and dropping.
Unfortunately, they have included a Recommended For You widget that you cannot remove – we’ll have to see how many advertisements they throw at us this way.
Another good feature is that the widgets are tied into the user permissions that you have, so you cannot see a graph or chart on information that you don’t have permission to view.
Let’s hope that they continue to expand this feature. Sure would be nice if there was a programming interface that would let third party developers add other “widgets” here!
Category: Program Updates, QuickBooks 2010
About the Author (Author Profile)
Charlie Russell is the founder of CCRSoftware. He’s been involved with the small business software industry since the mid 70’s, focusing on inventory and accounting software for small businesses. Charlie is a Certified Advanced QuickBooks ProAdvisor.
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This is great, Charlie!!
I would love to see a widget that showed the list of Balance Sheet accounts with a column for ‘last reconciled on’ date auto-filled.
This feature isn’t even in the Client Review, which I find ‘odd’.
I guess that is the difference between programmers and users.
Since you are both. . . thoughts?
It isn’t an issue of “users vs programmers”, it is an issue of the process that they use to develop their specifications, as well as the fact that there are hundreds of thousands of users and every one has a different idea of what the program should do…
My clients would like to see a way to compare sales and or income etc over a range of say the past 5 years. I do commercial spreads for them and create Excel graphs. It would be nice if something like this was on the snapshot page.
Yes, I would LOVE to see a column that shows all the accounts with ‘date of last reconciliation’ … that would come in very handy!
The “reccomended for you” is very annoying. Otherwise it’s a great page to look at.
Hi Elizabeth,
I am a product manager for QuickBooks and help drive what we work on for the next release. I read in your post that your clients are looking for a way to compare sales or income over a range of previous years. We heard that from a lot of customers. In fact, we included it in the QB 2010 Snapshot. You can add a widget that compares income across previous date ranges including years, quarters, months. You can see an example of the widget in the screen shot above called “Prev Year Income Comparison” and the drop down on the right side is where you select the ranges.
We also have the same widget for expenses.
Thanks,
Greg
We also heard