The Sales by Customer Summary in QuickBooks Online

The Sales by Customer Summary totals the sales you recorded to each customer over a period, one line per customer, with a grand total at the bottom. It answers a plain question with a single number per name: how much business did each customer bring in? Where the Profit and Loss rolls all of your income into account totals, this report breaks the sales side out by who bought from you.

What the Sales by Customer Summary shows

Each row is a customer, showing the total sales recorded to that customer over the period you set, and the report totals every customer at the bottom. It is the fastest way to see your revenue concentration: which customers make up most of your sales, which are occasional, and how the top of the list compares with the rest. Run for a full year or your whole history, it becomes a record of the customer relationships behind your top line, the kind of context that is easy to lose once the company is gone.

Cash basis vs accrual basis

These totals can shift with the accounting method, because the basis affects when a sale is counted. Where the report offers a cash or accrual option, the accrual view counts a sale when you invoiced it and the cash view counts it when the customer paid, so the same customer can total differently on each. Running it on both keeps the sales picture lined up with how the rest of your books are kept, and it is worth setting the method near the top of the report and running it again for the other basis.

Why a CPA or auditor asks for it

A buyer reviewing your business usually wants to know how dependent your revenue is on any single customer, and this is the report that shows it at a glance. A CPA may use it to reconcile recorded sales against what the income accounts report, or to notice a customer whose activity looks off for the period. In a sale or a due-diligence review, customer concentration is one of the first things anyone checks, so a clean history of sales by customer is a useful thing to have on hand.

How to run and export the Sales by Customer Summary in QuickBooks Online

1. Go to the Reports menu and type "Sales by Customer Summary" into the report search box, then open it.
2. Set the report period. For a complete archive, choose All Dates or run it once per fiscal year.
3. If the report offers an accounting method, set it to Cash or Accrual near the top and run it.
4. Use the export control at the top of the report to export it to Excel or PDF. The file downloads to your computer.
5. If you set a basis, switch the accounting method to the other one, run the report again, and export that version too.

The Excel export is usually the easier one to keep, because you can sort customers by total and filter the list later. Our guide to exporting all your data from QuickBooks covers how a sales report like this fits with the other records worth keeping before you cancel.

Keeping the Sales by Customer Summary after you cancel

We include this report in your Books Backup archive on request, and you can also export it yourself before you cancel. Either way it is worth having, because a cancelled paid QuickBooks Online company stays read-only for 12 months and is then permanently deleted, a trial only 90 days, and the IRS generally expects business records to be kept for at least three years, and longer in some situations. Once the company is deleted you cannot open QuickBooks to retrieve this customer-by-customer report, so it belongs in a copy you keep.

Frequently asked questions

Does this show what customers still owe me?

No. The Sales by Customer Summary totals what each customer bought, not what is still outstanding. For unpaid balances you would run Open Invoices or the accounts receivable aging reports, which show the invoices a customer has not yet paid.

Can I run it for my whole history at once?

Yes. Set the report period to All Dates before you export. For a business with years of sales the file can be long, so the spreadsheet export is usually easier to work with than a PDF because you can sort and filter it.

What is the difference between the summary and the detail version?

The summary gives one total line per customer. The Sales by Customer Detail lists the individual sales transactions behind each of those totals, which is the version to run when you need to see exactly which invoices or sales receipts made up a customer's number.