QuickBooks 2011: The Missing Manual

Running Time Reports

Customers don’t like being charged for too many hours, and workers are quick to complain if they’re paid for too few. Before you use time records either for billing customers or feeding your payroll records, it’s a good idea to generate reports to make sure your time data is correct. (Creating employee records explains how to set up employees in QuickBooks so their reported time links to your QuickBooks payroll.)

To generate a time report in QuickBooks, choose Reports→“Jobs, Time & Mileage”, and then select the report you want. Here are the ones you can choose from and what they’re useful for:

POWER USERS’ CLINIC: Tracking Time Online

Time Tracker and Intuit Time and Billing are add-on services that work with QuickBooks. Anyone who you set up to track time with these services logs into a website, fills in a timesheet, and submits it to you—you don’t have to do their data entry for them. And they can submit their time from any computer that has Internet access, so you don’t have to wait for an employee to get back from a trip to fill in a timesheet. The services even remind people to submit their time. You can review submitted time online and then download time data into QuickBooks in one fell swoop.

The bad news is these services aren’t free, although Intuit offers 30-day free trials. For Time Tracker, the price per month for a single person is $10 (that’s $120 a year). For up to five employees, the price is $25 per month. If you have more than 50 employees, the ...