What the QuickBooks Inventory Reports Are and How They Work

It is crucial to manage your inventory if you want to minimize or even avoid issues related to over- and understocking, which, in turn, can affect your business’s financial stability. QuickBooks follows this rule, and their products provide their customers with the required inventory reports. What they look like, how they work, how to customize them, and answers to other questions, are all found in our guide on QuickBooks inventory reports. 

What inventory reports in QuickBooks can you get?

QuickBooks offers multiple products that provide different types of inventory reports. 

In this article, we’ll focus on the QuickBooks Online inventory reports. However, you’ll find similar reports in other QuickBooks products. We’ll also answer some frequently asked questions and share insights related to the inventory reports across different QuickBooks products. 

QuickBooks Online inventory valuation reports

You can find inventory reports in QuickBooks Online in the Sales And Customers section. 

Or you can simply find them by name using the search bar.

On our screenshot, you can only see two reports: Inventory Valuation Details and Summary. However, there is also another inventory report, Physical Inventory Worksheet, available for users on the Plus subscription plan. Let’s check them out in detail.

QuickBooks Inventory Valuation Summary report

An Inventory Valuation Summary report displays the summarized data of quantity on hand, monetary cost, and the average cost of your assets.

You can use this report to get an overview of the value of your assets.

QuickBooks Inventory Valuation Detail report

An Inventory Valuation Detail report displays the data of transactions for each inventory asset and how they affect quantity, value, and cost. 

You can use this report to troubleshoot costing problems with your assets.

Physical Inventory Worksheet (only QuickBooks Online Plus)

A Physical Inventory Worksheet report displays your inventory items with space to enter your physical count. So, you can physically count and compare the actual quantity of assents to the quantity on hand in QuickBooks.

How to run inventory reports from QuickBooks Online

It’s actually very simple. Choose the necessary report, let’s say the inventory valuation detail, specify or choose the report period, then click Run report.

You can also customize the view of the Quickbooks inventory reports.

Customize your inventory report in QuickBooks Online

Click the Customize button and fill out the desired customization parameters:

• General: Report period, number format, and negative numbers
• Rows/columns: Group by and selection of columns plus their ordering
• Filter
• Header/footer: Company name, report title, report period, date prepared, and alignment

Unfortunately, this is the only available customization of inventory reports in QuickBooks Online. However, every problem always has a solution. A very popular one is to build a custom inventory report using the data from QuickBooks. Let’s see how it’s done in the next chapter.

How to make custom inventory reports in QuickBooks Online

In QuickBooks Online, you can’t make a custom inventory report. However, you can do this if you export your reports or raw data outside of QuickBooks, for example to Excel or Google Sheets. Both spreadsheet apps allow you to tailor custom reports, build dashboards, add charts and graphs, and many other manipulations with data.

Natively, you can download QuickBooks inventory reports as an Excel or PDF file. But this is not what we need to optimize our workflow. Instead, we’ll automate exports on a schedule using Coupler.io. This will let you have fresh data in your reports without any manual routine – copy pasting or downloading Excel files.

Coupler.io is a data integration tool to link different apps with Google Sheets, Microsoft Excel, and Google BigQuery. 

Automate exports of QuickBooks inventory reports

Sign up to Coupler.io, click Add new importer, and select the source and destination apps for your data flow:

• Source: QuickBooks Reports
• Destination: Google Sheets

In this example, we connect QuickBooks to Google Sheets. However, you can also link QuickBooks to BigQuery or automate the QuickBooks export to Excel. 

Source

• Connect your QuickBooks account. You’ll need to log in to QuickBooks Online and select a company.
• Select Inventory Valuation Summary. Optionally you can select a reporting period and a parameter to group data.

Note: Check out the Coupler.io documentation to learn more about Advanced settings for QuickBooks Reports.

If you want to fetch an Inventory Valuation Details report, you’ll need to select the Transaction List and filter out the inventory ones. We explain this below. 

Destination

• Connect your Google account and select a spreadsheet on your Google Drive and a sheet where to load your QuickBooks inventory report. 

Schedule

You can skip this step during the initial setup and click Save and Run to load the report to your spreadsheet right away. However, we want to have the report automatically updated in the spreadsheet, so we need to toggle on the Automatic data refresh and customize the schedule:

• Interval
• Days of week
• Time preferences
• Time zone

This is what the Inventory Valuation Summary report looks like in Google Sheets compared to its view in QuickBooks:

The only difference between the layout is that your QuickBooks inventory reports in Google Sheets are much easier for further processing. This means that you can easily share it with stakeholders or even combine it with other reports to make custom dashboards or reports.

Can I get an Inventory Valuation Details report with Coupler.io?

Coupler.io does not allow you to export the Inventory Valuation Details report as is. However, it allows you to fetch the information about all transactions, including those from the Inventory Valuation Details report.

• Select QuickBooks Reports as a source and Google Sheets as a destination
• Select a Transaction List report to export and specify a sheet where it will be loaded.

Here is what the result looks like in Google Sheets:

The only difference is that it does not show the quantity on hand compared to the Inventory Valuation Detail report.

QuickBooks inventory reports FAQs

We often get support requests asking slightly different questions about inventory reports in QuickBooks than what we’ve covered so far. So, we have accumulated them in this section for your convenience.

How to produce inventory age reports in QuickBooks Online

The Inventory Valuation Detail report actually contains the information about the dates when an inventory asset was added and sold. 

So you can use it as an inventory age report in QuickBooks Online. 

What is a QuickBooks Online inventory report with cost?

The Inventory Valuation Summary report provides you with information about the quantity and cost of your inventory assets.

What is a QuickBooks Online report inventory by vendor?

You can find information about vendors in the following reports:

• Expenses by Supplier Summary 
• Supplier Balance Detail
• Supplier Balance Summary
• Transaction List by Supplier

What QuickBooks Online report displays inventory stock on hand?

An Inventory Valuation Summary report displays the summarized data of inventory stock on hand.

Which QuickBooks product is best suited for inventory management?

From what you’ve read, it’s clear that QuickBooks Online does not give you many reporting options for the inventory. QuickBooks Desktop is slightly better, but it still loses to QuickBooks Commerce – this platform offers seven types of reports to track inventory and fulfillment across numerous sales channels and locations. 

In spite of this, you can still level up your inventory tracking in QuickBooks Online with the help of Coupler.io and Google Sheets. All you need to do is export your data and format it in a custom report or dashboard to meet your needs. Good luck with your data!