What Does the Customer Balance Summary Report Show?

Accounting Software

• Many accounting software programs, including Intuit's QuickBooks, allow you to generate a customer balance summary report. With a few clicks, the software creates a spreadsheet that points out unpaid customer balances and other vital information. When you know which of your customers hasn't yet sent you payment, you can politely ask them to send in a check, allowing you to pay your own bills. The exact information will vary, depending on what kind of software you use.

Customer Balances

• Customer balances are probably the most important information displayed by one of these reports. The QuickBooks brand of accounting software allows you to click the balance amount to display the list of transactions that resulted in the balance. Having this information at your fingertips can be quite useful. If your customer calls to ask why she owes so much, you can simply consult the sheet and tell her.

Administrative Information

• Many software programs assign a number to each invoice generated by your business, and this information is displayed in most customer balance summary reports. If your software is configured to do so, a report might also display the initials of the employee who served your customer or an identification number for any property the customer purchased.

Dates

• The customer balance summary report will generally also display the date on which your invoice was sent to the customer. This information is important, because you need to know how long the customer has been waiting to pay you. The earliest invoice dates on your report are the ones that you will probably want to clear up first, as you need to get that money into your income flow.

Status Indication

• Depending on the settings you've chosen for the program, the customer balance summary report might display the transaction status for each customer. That way, you can tell if your customer has received an invoice and has or hasn't paid you.