n-How to Find Gross Sales in QuickBooks
Gross sales is your total sales before discounts, returns, or any other deduction comes out, and QuickBooks doesn't hide it behind a separate calculation. Run the Sales by Customer or Sales by Product/Service report under Reports for a detailed breakdown, or open Profit and Loss and look at the very top income line before QuickBooks nets anything against it. Both get you the same number from a different angle.
The full walkthrough
1. For a quick total, open Profit and Loss. Go to Reports, search Profit and Loss, and set your date range. The first income line, before any discounts or cost of goods sold get subtracted, is your gross sales for that period.
2. For a breakdown by customer or item, run a Sales report instead. Search Sales by Customer Summary or Sales by Product/Service Summary under Reports. These total every sale before deductions, which is what you want if you're after gross sales specifically, not net.
3. Watch for discounts and returns hiding in the same report. QuickBooks sometimes nets a discount or return against the sale on the same line in a summary view. If you need the true gross figure split out from those deductions, run the report at the transaction-detail level instead of summary.
4. Set the date range to match what you're reporting on. Gross sales only means something next to a specific period, monthly, quarterly, or annual, so match the range to whatever you're comparing it against.
Why 'gross sales' isn't its own report
QuickBooks doesn't give gross sales a dedicated report because it isn't really its own calculation; it's just the starting number every other sales figure gets built from. Net sales, gross profit, and net income are all gross sales with something subtracted, in order: discounts and returns first, then cost of goods sold, then expenses.
That's fine for a single number pulled once a month. It gets slower when someone's building a recurring sales summary by hand, pulling the Profit and Loss top line into a spreadsheet alongside numbers from other systems, a POS, an e-commerce storefront, a separate point-of-sale app, that QuickBooks doesn't see at all.
What we've built on top of QuickBooks sales reporting
Consolidated sales dashboards
Gross sales from QuickBooks gets combined automatically with sales data from a storefront or POS system that doesn't run through QuickBooks at all, into one number instead of two reports someone merges by hand every week.
Scheduled sales summaries
A gross sales snapshot gets pulled and delivered on a recurring schedule, to an owner, a dashboard, or a spreadsheet, instead of someone remembering to log in and run the report themselves.
Where does your sales reporting still need a person?
Tell us what you're currently piecing together by hand, and we'll tell you if QuickBooks' own numbers can feed it directly instead.
Still pulling QuickBooks numbers into a spreadsheet every week?
Tell us what report you're rebuilding by hand and how often, and we'll tell you if it can land somewhere automatically instead. Sales reporting is just one version of this; the same question applies to any other manual number-pulling in the business.
Let's talk