QuickBooks 2011: The Missing Manual

Estimating Jobs

Many customers ask for an estimate before hiring you. 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, it also feeds numbers into your customers’ invoices as you perform the work. When you create an estimate in QuickBooks, you add the items you’ll sell or deliver and set the markup on those items.

Note

Before you can create estimates in QuickBooks, you have to turn on the estimate preference. Choose Edit→Preferences→Jobs & Estimates, and then click the Company Preferences tab. In the “Do You Create Estimates?” section, select Yes, and then click OK.

QuickBooks estimates make short work of pricing small time and material jobs. But QuickBooks estimating isn’t for every business. Particularly in construction, where 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 24).

Note

The totals on estimates don’t post to accounts in your chart of accounts. After all, an ...