QuickBooks reporting & business intelligence
Your margin is decided by marketplace fees, shipping, returns and ad spend — and most of that never makes it into QuickBooks as anything more than a lump-sum deposit or an expense line. MerchantsBI joins QuickBooks Online to every channel you sell on, so you get custom reporting by customer, channel and SKU without exporting anything to Excel.
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None of them is wrong. QuickBooks, Shopify, Amazon and your payment processor each count a different moment in the same sale. Until someone writes down which one the business runs on, the number in the monthly report is whichever one was easiest to pull.
What you'd actually ask
Not because it's bad accounting software. Because the data that answers them lives in your storefront, your marketplaces, your shipping account and your ad platforms — and joining them to your books has never been anybody's job.
TodayRun the P&L, export the Amazon settlement, export Shopify, pull the shipping invoices, and line them up by hand. Two days, and the answer is still an estimate.
TodayThe item's cost is in QuickBooks, the marketplace fee is in a settlement report, and the freight is on a spreadsheet. The margin you quote is whichever version was handy.
TodayThe AR aging report tells you who is late today. Nobody has looked at the trend by customer over a year, because that means exporting twelve months and pivoting it.
TodayStock lives in QuickBooks, the storefront and the warehouse, and they rarely agree. You find out from a stockout.
TodayAd spend is in Meta and Google, orders are in Shopify, revenue is in QuickBooks, and refunds land weeks later. Nobody goes back and checks.
TodayYour bookkeeper, your ops lead and you each build an explanation from a different export, and the meeting becomes an argument about whose number is right.
Where teams tell us they get stuck
QuickBooks Online reporting covers a lot, and for many businesses it is genuinely enough. Here is what each option is good at, and what we hear from merchants who have outgrown it.
Built for the books
Profit and loss, balance sheet, cash flow, AR and AP aging, sales by customer and by product. Fast, familiar and exactly right for month-end and for your accountant.
What we hear: "It's perfect until someone asks for margin by channel."
Filters, columns, saved views
Any standard report can be customized and saved, which makes QuickBooks custom reporting the everyday workhorse. With classes and locations on the higher plans, you can slice a long way.
What we hear: "We've got forty saved reports, and the one we need still ends in an Excel export."
Included with QuickBooks Online Advanced
A more flexible builder for pivoting and charting the data in your books. If you're already on Advanced, it is a real step up and worth using properly.
The question we'd ask: is the data you need actually in QuickBooks? Advanced reporting in QuickBooks is still reporting on QuickBooks.
Where every gap ends up
When a report needs data from outside the books, it gets exported and stitched together in a spreadsheet. It works, and almost every growing merchant runs on it for a while.
What we hear: "Only one person knows how the workbook fits together, and it takes them two days every month."
We're not going to tell you QuickBooks is the problem. It's good accounting software doing exactly what accounting software should. The only question is whether the answer you need is in your books — and for merchants selling across channels, usually half of it isn't.
What changes
Nothing about how your bookkeeper uses QuickBooks changes. What changes is everything that currently happens in Excel afterwards.
AI analyst
No report to customize first, no export, and no waiting for whoever owns the spreadsheet. Ask a follow-up and it keeps its place in the conversation.
Who were my top twenty customers by revenue last quarter?
Which of them pay later than 45 days on average?
Now show me their margin after shipping.
The reason most finance people won't trust AI with a number is that it might make one up. This one structurally can't.
The AI decides what to ask your data — it doesn't author the figure. Every value comes straight out of the query result, so a misreported number isn't something we guard against. It isn't possible.
Ask for something that doesn't exist in your data and you get a clarifying question, never a confident answer built on a field it made up.
Drill into any row, widen the top twenty to a top hundred, or trace a figure back to the QuickBooks invoice behind it. Nobody has to take it on faith.
Before you ask
Often, yes — though it is worth checking the premise first. QuickBooks is usually the books rather than the whole business. Most teams who call themselves QuickBooks-only find four or five other sources once they count: the storefront, a marketplace or two, the payment processor, the ad accounts, and the spreadsheet someone maintains by hand to tie them together. If any of those decide a number you report on, you are already running a multi-system business.
If you genuinely are QuickBooks-only, the value shifts to how you work with the data. Today, a new question means someone customizes a report, exports it and builds something in Excel. With MerchantsBI you type the question, get the answer and ask the next one — and dashboards go to anyone you choose without using up a QuickBooks seat.
Where we would be straight with you: if all you need is a clean P&L, balance sheet or AR aging, the reports already in QuickBooks Online handle that well and you do not need us.
QuickBooks Online ships a solid library of standard reports — profit and loss, balance sheet, cash flow, AR and AP aging, sales by customer and by product or service, and more — and every one can be customized with filters, columns and date ranges, then saved. The higher plans add class and location tracking, and QuickBooks Online Advanced adds Advanced Reporting for more flexible custom reports. For reporting on what is inside your books, that covers a lot of ground.
Open any standard report, choose Customize, adjust the filters, columns and grouping, then save it as a custom report so it appears under your saved reports. That is the right approach for anything that lives inside QuickBooks. QuickBooks custom reporting runs out of road when the report needs data QuickBooks does not have — marketplace fees, shipping costs, ad spend or storefront orders — which is the point where teams start exporting to Excel, and where MerchantsBI takes over.
Advanced Reporting is the more flexible report builder that comes with the QuickBooks Online Advanced plan. It is a genuine step up for pivoting and visualizing data that is already in QuickBooks, and if you are on Advanced it is worth using. The question to ask before upgrading for it is the same one we ask about any tool: is the data you need actually in QuickBooks? If the answer you want depends on your sales channels, fulfilment or ad platforms, advanced reporting in QuickBooks will still be looking at only part of the picture.
It depends on what you are reporting on. If you need better-looking management packs built from your books, a QuickBooks add-on focused on financial statements may be all you need. If your margin is decided by things outside the books — channel fees, freight, returns, advertising — look for reporting software that treats QuickBooks as one source among several and reconciles them to a single definition before you see a number. That second kind is what MerchantsBI is.
Yes, but the hard part is not moving the data, it is reconciling it. A storefront order, a marketplace settlement and a QuickBooks invoice or deposit each describe a different moment in the same sale, often summarized differently. MerchantsBI brings them into one model and applies one definition of revenue and margin the same way every month, so the combined report means the same thing in June as it did in May.
Our native QuickBooks connector is for QuickBooks Online. If you run QuickBooks Desktop or QuickBooks Enterprise, talk to us before assuming it will not work — there is often another route to the data — but we would rather tell you that up front than have you find out on a demo.
You connect through Intuit's own sign-in, so we never see your QuickBooks password, and the connection is read-only — MerchantsBI reads your data and never writes anything back to your books. After the first load it reads only records that have changed, and every report, dashboard and question runs against your own copy of the data rather than against QuickBooks itself.
Invoices, bills, payments, customers, vendors, products and services, the chart of accounts and estimates, plus your company information. That is enough to report on sales, receivables, payables and margin by customer and item — and to join all of it to the data from your other systems.
Not to see MerchantsBI dashboards. QuickBooks Online caps the number of users by plan, and licensing is between you and Intuit. On our side, dashboards are shared with anyone you choose without using a QuickBooks seat, and permissions control exactly what each person can see — so the sales team can see sales without anyone handing them access to the books.
Days rather than months. Connecting QuickBooks Online takes a few minutes from whoever administers it. Most of the first week is someone in finance confirming the mapping and signing off that the numbers tie to your last closed month — nobody sees a dashboard until they do.
The export stops. The data is pulled automatically on the schedule you set, the report is defined once, and the finished view is delivered to whoever needs it. Teams usually keep Excel for one-off modelling and stop rebuilding the same monthly workbook from scratch.
Twenty minutes. We'll take the one you rebuild every month, show you what it looks like when QuickBooks and your channels agree, and tell you honestly if this is worth your time.
No QuickBooks access needed for the call. A screenshot is enough.