QuickBooks 2005: The Missing Manual

Estimating Jobs

Many customers ask for an estimate before hiring you to perform a job. If you're good with numbers, you might tot up the costs in your head and scribble the estimate on a napkin. But creating estimates in QuickBooks not only generates a more professional-looking estimate for your customer, but it also makes it easier to invoice your customer as you perform the work. (Estimates aren't available in QuickBooks Basic.) QuickBooks estimates make short work of pricing small time and material jobs. When you create an estimate in QuickBooks, you add the items you'll sell or deliver and set the markup on those items.

Truth be told, QuickBooks estimating is not for every business. Particularly in construction, when you might require hundreds or even thousands of items for a major project, you definitely don't want to enter all the data you'd need to build the Item List for your project. That's why most construction firms turn to third-party estimating packages, which come with databases of the services and products you need. Many of these estimating packages integrate with QuickBooks, which means you can import an estimate you created in another program and use it to produce your invoices (see Chapter 21).

Note

An estimate doesn't mean that your customer is going to go ahead with the job. For that reason, the totals on estimates don't post to accounts in your Chart of Accounts. When you turn on the preference for estimates (page 142), QuickBooks creates a nonposting account, ...