Question

Sales By Item Summary report shows total for sub-item but not for parent item

Forum|Forum|6 months ago
January 7, 2026
1 reply
7 views

Most of our customers pay several invoices with a payment that also includes deductions for things like advertising costs, shortage or damage claims, etc. we then issue a credit memo to apply to the resulting balance that remains on any invoice included in the payment.

I set up an item "Advertising" linked to the Advertising Expense account, and then I set up sub-item to track advertising of specific products, because some of the advertising charges our customers deduct are for general advertising and some are for promotion of specific products.

Over the past year, I created several credit memos with multiple line items for the various advertising deductions taken by customer. Now I am reviewing our sales data for specific customers, and I know the total for the item "Advertising" (general advertising), is much more than all product-specific advertising combined. However when I run a "Sales By Item Summary" report, the amounts from the credit memos for the sub-items is on the report, but the main "Advertising" item is totally missing. What could be causing this?

QuickBooks Enterprise Suite

B

BabyB

QuickBooks Team

Hi, W012. I appreciate the detailed information you shared. I’d like to share some points regarding the Sales by Item Summary report.

Please note that QuickBooks generates the Sales by Item Summary report by treating sub-items as separate entities. If the parent item hasn’t been used directly in any transactions, such as credit memos or invoices, it won’t appear in the report because there is no data associated with it. However, the sub-items will show up since transactions reference them directly. This explains why the main Advertising item appears to be missing, and only the combined data for the sub-items is displayed.

To access detailed sales data, including separate totals for sub-items an

d their corresponding parent items, I recommend generating the Sales by Item Detail report. This report provides a complete list of transactions involving these items, allowing you to analyze the totals comprehensively.

This thread will remain open if you have other questions or need further assistance. We'll be here to help you.

W

W012Author

Thanks for your reply BabyB, however the summary report is not reflecting the combined parent + sub-item total for "Advertising".

A different parent item ("Marketing") which has multiple sub-items set up is showing the total for each Marketing sub-item as a separate line on the summary report AND shows a line item "Marketing - Other" for the total of all transactions of the parent item (Marketing) made during the year, and then a separate line item ("Total Marketing") showing the the combined parent + sub-items total for the year.

The only difference I could find is that for "Advertising", I only had 1 sub-item set up; and for "Marketing" we have several sub-items set up. So after my post yesterday, I created a second sub-item for "Advertising", and re-ran the "Sales By Item Summary" report again, and suddenly the report now shows the parent item total for the year on one line and the sub-item total for the year on a separate line, and then another line that shows the combined total for the year.

Seems there is a glitch in the software imho. Hopefully this will be fixed in a near future update.

Tori B

QuickBooks Team

Thanks for checking back with us, @W012.

I'm happy to see that you found a workaround that works for you.

If the issue happens again, I recommend reaching out to our Technical Support Team. This way, one of our agents can review your account in a secure environment and investigate this matter further. If needed our team can escalate this glitch to our Engineering Team.

If there is anything else we can assist you with, please don't hesitate to let us know. Take care!

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