There are several preferences in XpandedReports. The General Preferences are set upon installation of the product by proceeding through a wizard. The Custom Fields Preference is available as part of the Edit pull down menu.

General Preferences

Set up Wizard

As part of the setup/installation process, there is wizard which will provide a step by step review of these options. It is possible to edit the preferences from the Edit menu option as well.

Step 1: This General Setup wizard will launch automatically each time XpandedReports is opened. It you prefer not to have it launch automatically, check the box to "Hide on start up." It is also possible to skip the wizard and make any modifications via Edit > Preferences.

Step 4: The "Prompt Me" preference is set to be checked by default. This is strongly recommended so that the user can make changes to the columns, date range, [QB] filters, etc. before the data is extracted from QuickBooks.


Step 5: The final screen in the General Setup wizard is confirmation that everything has been set up.

Edit Preference

To make changes subsequent to proceeding through the wizard, choose Edit > Preferences.

Custom Fields Preference

The custom field list shown based on the QuickBooks file that is open at the time XpandedReports is launched. If there are not any custom fields that have been created in the QuickBooks data file, there will not be any custom fields on the XR Preference screen.

By default, all custom fields are a text field in QuickBooks with a maximum of 30 characters.

Note: For QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions version 10, even though it is possible in the QuickBooks software to designate the type of data to be contained in the field, the SDK returns the values as text. So, the preference will still need to be set to the appropriate type. The advantage, however, with QBES 10 is that with the ability to set the data type, the data entry will be more consistent than the free form box alternative in all the other QuickBooks products.