What is QBAR?
QuickBooks Enterprise has provided a potent reporting tool to meet the needs of its various types of customers. The native reports are great but generic and cannot fulfill specific requirements. For example, a commission report is not included in the set of native pieces because it is highly customized for each business. QBAR provides all the power and flexibility to build very specialized reports and dashboards to suit the needs of any business.
What makes QBAR so powerful?
The underlying reporting engine of QBAR is QlikView. QlikView is one of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms. Qlik’s associative engine helps you explore your data surprisingly and quickly. It would help if you used it to understand it.
Why is QBAR a game-changer for QuickBooks Enterprise customers?
The maker of QuickBooks has attempted many times to provide a tool to its customers to build the report of their need because they know it is not possible to create reports to serve all of its very diverse customer bases.
All the previous attempts involved using another tool like Excel or Crystal reports building the report. But with QBAR, they hit the nail in the right place because QBAR has everything. It is a reporting engine with the capability of creating compelling dashboards. So, there is no need to rely on any other tool to see your data.
How to access QBAR?
QBAR is available under the Reports menu as Advanced Reporting. If you have never used it, the menu is shown as ‘Learn about Advanced Reporting.’
On click, it starts installing the QBAR for you. Please make sure to be in the Multi-user mode.
How does QBAR works?
Once the installation is complete, QBAR starts pulling data from the company file to build its reporting database. It may take some time if your company file is big.
Once the update is done, it opens a sample report for you. You may play around to understand the workings of it. I want to mention that this sample report is not even 1% of what QBAR can do for you.
QBAR runs as a standalone app, which is good because it does not impact the performance of QuickBooks. It is not so good if your company file is huge because it takes some time to update data.
What are the starter reports:
QBAR has a few starter reports. The main idea behind this is to give users something to start from and customize it to their needs. You may play with them to understand the tool better.
You may use the ‘Start From Scratch’ template to build a report from scratch.
I have created a step-by-step guide to building an Open sales report by customer and item.
Can QBAR write back to QB?
The data flow is one way, from QuickBooks to QBAR and not the other way. However, if you have such a need, you may contact us to help you with it.
Can QBAR print or export the report to Excel or PDF?
Yes, it is supported in QBAR. The reports can be exported to Excel and can be printed as PDFs. QBAR also supports printing the dashboard with more than widgets, but it has some limitations like it can print only what is shown on the current screen.
How is permission handled for QBAR?
The admin user has permission to run QBAR. Other users can be granted permission from Company > Users > Set up User & Roles. It is under File >QuickBooks Advanced Reporting. The only available options are Full or None. If a user has permission to QBAR, he can see all the reports and their content even if he is not authorized to see the same content inside QuickBooks.
Where are the resources available to learn QBAR?
Qbar.intuit.com has some good videos
You can check our blogs.
We have put some good videos here.