QuickBooks Tips – 5 Reasons to Use QuickBooks Group Items – Part 1

QuickBooks provides you with a powerful, and time saving tool within your items list, which is often under utilized and often misunderstood — the QuickBooks Group Item.

5 Reasons To Use QuickBooks Group Items:

1. Creating and using Group Items is useful for quickly entering a group of individual items that you have already set up as single items in your Item List.
2. Group Items are versatile – you can choose to print – or – not to print the items within the group, meaning you can track more detail than your customer needs to see.
3. Group Items ensure that you don’t “leave something out” – which means lost dollars on your part.
4. Group Items speed up the creation of Estimates and Invoices – imagine being able to pull in 19 items with a single click of a mouse.
5. Group Items allow you to bridge the difference in units of measure used to buy and sell products or materials.

The following example deals with the CSI MasterFormat Cost Code section 03.20.00 for Concrete Reinforcing.

How to create a Group Item

In the QuickBooks Item list, you’ll want to have the individual items set up (03.21.00 through 03.24.00) as double-sided items.

Once these items are in place.

From the Item List, click the Item button at the bottom of the list window -> select New.  From the New Item window choose Group from the Type drop down menu.  In the Group Name/Number type in 02.20.00 Concrete Reinforcing, in the Item column select each of the individual components on the Concrete Reinforcing section.  I’ve even added an Subtotal and Overhead & Profit item to the group.  My group now contains a total of 10 line items.

IF you want your customer to see all 10 lines within the group, click into and place a check in the “Print items in group” option.  IF you do not want your customer to see all 10 line items, leave this option unchecked and they will see ONLY 03.20.00 Concrete Reinforcing, while YOU still see all the detail.

How to Use the Group Item After It’s Created

Open an Estimate or Invoice form, click into the Item Column, find the Group Item and enter you cost amounts (enter costs ONLY if you are using an Overhead & Profit item within the group).  As you enter the cost associated with each line item, QuickBooks calculates and updates the subtotal, overhead & profit (if the item is setup as a percentage), sales tax (if applicable), and Estimate total.

When you use the Item list for job costing (on vendor bills, checks, etc.) you would still job cost against the individual items in the item list.

Tomorrow,  in Part 2, find out how to use Group Items to bridge differences in units of measure.