QuickBooks 2005: The Missing Manual

Creating Jobs in QuickBooks

Project-based work means that your current effort for a customer has a beginning and an end, although it sometimes seems like your project will last forever. Whether you build custom software programs or skyscrapers, you can use job tracking in QuickBooks to analyze financial performance by job. If you sell products to retailers and don't give a hoot about job tracking, you can simply invoice your customers for the products and services you sell without ever creating a job in QuickBooks. On the other hand, suppose you want to know whether you're making more money on the mansion you're building or the bungalow remodel. What's more, you want to know the percentage of profit you made on each project. These financial measures are the reason you create jobs for each project you want to track.

In QuickBooks, jobs connect to customers like baby possums clinging to their mothers. A QuickBooks job always belongs to a customer. In fact, the Add Job command is disabled on the QuickBooks menus if you haven't selected a customer.

Note

Although job tracking is not available in QuickBooks Basic Edition, customers still appear on the Customer:Job List. The New Customer dialog box still includes the Job Info tab so you can add one set of job information for each customer. What you can't do is create jobs and produce reports that show performance for each job you do for a customer.

Creating a New Job

Because a job belongs to a customer, you must first create a customer before ...