Running a Balance Sheet by Class or Location

The Balance Sheet feature includes the ability to show Location and Class summary columns, and will filter by Location and Class. There is no filtering by account on a Balance Sheet,  since the report would not balance if certain accounts were excluded.

Filtering by Class
The Balance Sheet by Class report will be incorrect, since the Accounts Receivable (A/R) and Accounts Payable (A/P) accounts will be wrong. In order for them to be correct, you would need to enter all related transactions as General Journal entries, specifying a Class on each line. Unless you're an accountant, this probably isn't the best way to proceed. Here's why:

Every transaction (with the exception of journal entries) is separated into a header and a detail portion. For example:

• On a Check/Cheque, the bank account is the header and the account selected in the table is the detail.
• On an Invoice, A/R is the header and the income account linked to your product/service is the detail.

The type of transaction information pulled into a report depends on the type of report. For example:

• The Profit & Loss (P&L) report pulls information from the detail of transactions, in which income and expense accounts are selected.
• A Balance Sheet pulls in header portions of transactions, in which asset, liability and equity accounts are selected.

When Classes are used, they get attached to the detail portion of transactions. They do not get associated with the header accounts. Therefore, since a P&L pulls information from the transaction detail, it can be customized by Class and be correct. However, a Balance Sheet by Class report will never be correct, since it pulls data from headers. (Remember, the Class data does not get saved with the header—actually, no where can a bank account, loan account, etc., all headers, cannot be linked to a Class.)

QBO assumes that all data pertains to just one company, so it will always provide just a single Balance Sheet, and not one split in Classes.

Locations
If you want to use one QBO company to run different businesses at different locations, you'll want to create a Balance Sheet and P&L for each. When a Location is saved on a transaction, it gets saved on the header and the detail. This makes it possible to run a Balance Sheet by Location report and get correct results. You can also filter your report by location to see the appropriate column for that location.

Note: Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable and Payroll transactions may have amounts in "Unspecified " because Bill Payment, Receive Payment and Paycheck/cheque transactions can't be split by locations.

If you have either Bill Payment, Receive Payment or Payroll transactions that involve multiple locations, the transaction will reflect "Unspecified" and will either need to be split into transactions that only involve one location or correct the location with a journal entry.