The Sales by Product/Service Summary in QuickBooks Online

The Sales by Product/Service Summary totals what you sold for each product or service over a period: the quantity sold and the sales amount for every item, with the share each one made up of your total sales. One line per item, it turns your sales into a ranked picture of what actually moved and what it brought in.

What the Sales by Product/Service Summary shows

For each product or service, the report shows the quantity sold, the total sales amount, the percentage of overall sales, and the average price per unit. For inventory items it can also show the cost of goods sold and the gross margin, so you can see not only what sold but what it earned. Read top to bottom, it is your product mix for the period, from your best seller down to the items that barely moved. Services show up here too, so a business that sells time rather than goods still gets a clean breakdown of which offerings drove the revenue.

Cash basis vs accrual basis

The 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 an item can total differently on each. Running it on both keeps the report lined up with how the rest of your books are kept. You can set the method near the top of the report and run it again for the other basis.

Why a CPA or auditor asks for it

It shows where your revenue actually comes from at the item level, which matters when someone is valuing the business or planning around it. A CPA may use it to reconcile item sales against the income accounts, or to sanity-check margins on the products you sell. A buyer often wants to see which products or services carry the business and how concentrated the sales are in a few items. Kept year by year, it also documents how your product mix changed over time, which is hard to reconstruct once the underlying data is gone.

How to run and export the Sales by Product/Service Summary in QuickBooks Online

1. Go to the Reports menu and type "Sales by Product/Service 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 spreadsheet export is usually the more useful one to keep, since you can re-sort items by quantity or amount later. Our guide to what belongs in an audit-ready archive covers how a sales breakdown like this fits with the core reports.

Keeping the Sales by Product/Service 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 keeping, 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. The item-level history of what sold is something you cannot recompute after the company is deleted.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need inventory tracking to run this report?

No. The report works for service and non-inventory items as well as inventory items, so any business that sets up products or services in QuickBooks can run it. The cost of goods sold and gross margin columns only fill in for inventory items, because those figures depend on inventory tracking, which is available on the Plus and Advanced plans.

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

The summary gives one line per item with its totals. The Sales by Product/Service Detail lists the individual sales transactions behind each item, which is the version to run when you need to see exactly which invoices or sales receipts made up an item's number.

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 a long sales history the file can be large, so the spreadsheet export is usually easier to work with than a PDF.