QuickBooks 2011: The Missing Manual

Creating Jobs in QuickBooks

Project-based work means that your current effort for a customer has a beginning and an end, even if it sometimes seems like the project will last forever. Whether you build custom software programs or apartment buildings, you can use QuickBooks’ job-tracking features to analyze financial performance by project.

If you sell products and don’t give a hoot about job tracking, you can simply invoice customers for the products 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 on the bungalow remodel, and the percentage of profit you made on each project. QuickBooks can tell you these financial measures as long as you create jobs for each project you want to track.

In QuickBooks, jobs cling to customers like baby possums to their mothers. A QuickBooks job always belongs to a customer. In fact, if you try to choose the Add Job command before you create a customer, you’ll see a message box telling you to create a customer first. Both the New Customer dialog box and the Edit Customer dialog box include tabs for customer info and job info. So when you create a customer, in effect, you create one job automatically, but you can add as many as you need.

Creating a New Job

Because jobs belong to customers, you have to create a customer (Creating a New Customer) before you can create any of that customer’s jobs. Once the customer exists, follow these steps to add a job to the customer’s record:

1. In the Customer Center, right-click the customer you want, and then choose Add Job from the shortcut menu.

   You can also select the customer in the Customers & Jobs tab, and then, in the Customer Center toolbar, choose New Customer & Job→Add Job. Either way, the New Job dialog box appears.

2. In the Job Name box, type a name for the job.

   This name will appear on invoices and other customer documents. You can type up to 41 characters in the box. The best names are short but easily recognizable by both you and the customer.

   QuickBooks fills in most of the remaining job fields with the information you entered for the customer associated with this job. You can skip the fields on the Address Info, Additional Info, and Payment Info tabs unless the information on these tabs is different for this job. For example, if materials for the job go to a different shipping address than the customer’s, type the address in the fields on the Address Info tab.

3. If you want to add info about the job type, dates, or status, click the Job Info tab and enter values in the appropriate fields.

   If you add job types (Vendor Type List), you can analyze jobs with similar characteristics, no matter which customer hired you to do the work. Filling in the Job Status field lets you see what’s going on by scanning the Customer Center, as shown in Figure 4-9. If you want to see whether you’re going to finish the work on schedule, you can document your estimated and actual dates for the job in the Date fields (the box on Specifying Job Information has more about these fields).

   Note

   To change the values you can choose in the Job Status field, modify the status text in Preferences (see Jobs & Estimates).

4. After you’ve filled in the job fields, click Next to create another job for the same customer, or click OK to save the job and close the New Job dialog box.

Figure 4-9. When you select a job in the Customer Center (jobs are indented below their customers), the Job Information section of the window displays Job Status, Start Date, Projected End, and End Date. If you want to edit info you’ve entered for a job, double-click a job’s name in the left-hand list to open the Edit Job dialog box.

POWER USERS’ CLINIC: Specifying Job Information

The fields on the New Job dialog box’s Job Info tab are optional—you can invoice a customer even if every one is blank. However, the Job Status and Job Type fields can both help you analyze your business performance, past and future. You don’t even have to use the terms that QuickBooks provides in the Job Status drop-down list; you can customize the list by adjusting the Jobs and Estimates preferences described on Jobs & Estimates.

Here’s a guide to the Job Info tab’s fields and how you can put them to use:

• Job status. This field can indicate trends in your business. If several jobs are set to Pending status, for example, a resource crunch might be in your future.

• Start date. Set this field to the date you started the job.

• Projected end. If you’ve estimated when you’ll complete the job, select that date here.

• End date. When you complete the job, set this field to the date you actually finished up. By comparing the actual end date with your projection, you can improve future estimates or change how you work in order to finish jobs on time.

• Description. Here’s where you can type a detailed description of the job to remind you about the work in case the job’s name doesn’t ring any bells.

• Job type. If you categorize your jobs, choose the job type (Vendor Type List) from this drop-down menu.