Accounts Receivable Report With Future Dated Invoices

Sarbanes Oxley: Now there's something I'll bet is on the mind of every business that uses a small business accounting system like Quickbooks. NOT. :)

You *HAVE* that option. Use a different date, open the A/R register, create a custom report.... all options are open to you.

YES INDEED YOU ARE! You are asking (and not Intuit, cuz for sure as heck this is not the Intuit suggestion format) for a NEW defintion of the aging report.

Well, let's see. You proposed that question in a limited forum.. and got a majority of 'NO' responses. Who did you think you were asking? This is the newsgroup populated by and created by QB user's. And we are emphatically telling you we do not want the defintion of A/R to be changed.

Yeah, it is. Allan I have finaly seen the light! Will, find another software program and another NG to annoy.

Not at all! Although I see why someone would think so.

They just hit the jackpot with using available simple software technology for a menial, mundane, boring, error prone and repetitive task of running a business, which is what bookkeeping is.

The big issue here is that bookkeeping has to be accurate and a computer can do calculations a million times better than someone pushing paper from one desk to another.

So they took that user-friendly checkbook metaphor, already successful with Quicken, and used it in Quickbooks for a small business, where bookkeeping is much more important compared to a home's or individual's finances.

When Quickbooks came out, all the rest of related software were still in the Dark Ages of computing (middle to late 80's) and some of them still are. But Quickbooks is not easy by design. It' easy by association. They didn't invent or improve anything beyond existing software capabilities - and that's where QB's advantages end.

The programming code underneath the user interface is a horrid mess of convoluted dreck which is getting worse with each successive version. After so many years of pathetic product quality they, apparently, moved QB on a more standard database structure which, at best, may have some good results some time far into the future. In the meantime, they're all still ignoring the substandard quality of a program they're peddling for $3,000++ a copy to the unsuspecting.

For someone that has to deal with 10 payments a week and 10 customers per month QB is adequate and much better than keeping everything on paper. For any other business it is severely lacking in features to make it a decent bookkeeping program.

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Accountants, bookkeepers, and in the case of Allan sociopaths with very bad table manners. :)

I don't think a typical end user of this program uses USENET, let alone spends the amounts of time with it that many of us do. The typical end user runs a small business and simply needs certain types of information. To get a statistically valid sampling, you would need to directly contact those users, not post questions on computer forums. The typical user of this program wouldn't have a clue about what a strict definition of A/R is, because in most companies with less than 20 employees the person who does books doesn't have the level of financial education or expertise to pass as a controller or CFO or accountant.

You are right. I confused things significantly by trying to distort a well-accepted accounting concept like A/R What I really wanted was a different report, with a name something like "Projected Cash Inflows" that looks an awful lot like the A/R Details report, but which includes future-dated invoices so that you can see a wholistic view of what cash is coming in and when.

Having admitted my mistake, my frustration is that people are focusing on the mistake and not on a legitimate information requirement that drove the question. It would be like my accidentally substituting the word 'umbrella' for 'raincoat' and saying "It's raining I need to put on my umbrella." Immediately everyone jumps on the incorrect word use and simply ignores the fact that yes in fact it is raining. The useful response would be "Will, you can't put on an umbrella, but yes it's raining and probably you could put on a raincoat." The not useful response is "No you can't put on your umbrella. Deal with it."

No, you can't make A/R something it is not and include future-dated invoices into it. But, yes, business people probably do have a legitimate need to see all the projected cash inflows into their business, and yes that probably does include that future-dated invoice that will come due in 20 days. I guess Quickbooks probably could be slightly more useful if it gave an additional report to see that information in a useful way. That report would probably look somewhat similar to the A/R Details report.

Did you know that you and Allan have remarkable things in common:

- You both post to USENET through the same USENET server.

- You both have dynamic IPs assigned by the same ISP.

- You both mispell words in a similar way.

Maybe you guys should hang out together. :)

Gosh almighty. You mean you have never ever seen that great report called a "Cash Flow Forcast" that is right there in your list of available reports?

"Cash Flow Forecast" gives you the summary numbers but not the detail, and no proxy for the Aging concept on the individual detail lines. Yes you can blow up the detail underneath, but you want to have a single report open that shows it all. The beautiful thing about A/R Detail is I can leave that thing open constantly and just touching it I can see it update. I get a lot of information very quickly.

Maybe there is another report in QB 2006? We are using QB 2004.

So, to summarize, a "Cash Flow Forecast Details" report would - for my use - be more informative and useful to me as a business person than A/R Detail. And my guess is that if you took non-accountant, non-bookkeeper management-level users of the product and carefully explained what is in each of those reports, the vast majority of the managers would prefer the Cash Flow Forecast Details because it better reflects what they want to know: how much cash is coming into this business in the next N days.

Why can't you just modify a QuickReport of Accounts Receivable to show only those dates that are in the future and then save the memorized report? I just tried this with an end date of the year 9999 and it accepted it. Run the memorized report periodically and it will call up any future A/R transactions. I think the built-in A/R Aging Report is doing what it is supposed to be doing; showing you current, 1-30, 31-60 etc. A future A/R is not 'current' so it won't show in the current column. Your initial posting said you were not really dealing with future receivables but wanting to track entry mistakes. A QuickReport such as I described will list any and all such mistakes. You could even double-click on the entries in the report to call up the transaction and fix it right away.