A QuickBooks tip for entering Job-to-data costs and billing data at the item level when converting or archiving.
Use this procedure to enter Job-to-date (“JTD”) costs and JTD billing so the Job Profitability Detail Report is accurate at the Item level after converting your existing Quickbooks file to a new database file, or after archiving old QuickBooks transactions. In both cases, you are bringing over beginning balances as of the conversion date into your new data file, and this procedure will prove useful for reporting on jobs that are in progress as of the conversion date.
From your old data file:
Run your Job Profitability Detail Reports for each job in progress to obtain the JTD cost and revenue figures as of the conversion date. In the date fields, leave the first field blank, enter the conversion date in the second date field. You will use the figures on this report for your data entry in the new data file.
In the new data file:
- Create a fake Vendor called “Opening Balance”. You will make this inactive after completing this procedure.
- Create an Other Expense account in the Chart of Accounts called “9999-Conversions-JTD Costs”. You will make this inactive after completing this procedure.
- Create an Other Income account in the Chart of Accounts called “9998 · Conversion – JTD billing”. You will make this inactive after completing this procedure.
- Create a Service Item called “Opening balance JTD Costs” and link it to “9999 · Conversion – JTD Costs”. You will make this inactive after completing this procedure.
- Print your Item List. (Reports>List>Item Listing) Modify the report to display columns for Account and COGS Account; remove price, cost, tax code, etc.
- Look at your Item list and determine which Service Items appear on your Job Profitability Detail Reports. These are the items to edit in step 9. These are active items.
- In the Item List window, make all other Service Items temporarily inactive. Making them inactive will keep them from appearing in the Add/Edit Multiple Items screen allowing you to quickly copy down the account edits you will perform in step 9.
- Create a backup before performing step 9!
- Using the Add/Edit Multiple Items screen (available in QB 2010 and later) ,edit “all active service items” and point the COGS/Expense account to account 9999 and point the Account/Income account to 9998. Change the top item, and quickly copy down the account edits to the other items. Click Save. Do not update existing transactions. You will have to answer No repeatedly by pressing N until it scrolls through all your changes.
- When you are done with the following procedures, you will edit these same Items again, and change the COGS/Expense and Account/Income accounts back to what they were. Do not update existing transactions. You will have to answer No repeatedly by pressing N until it scrolls through all your changes.
To enter the JTD Costs for each item on each job:
Enter a zero dollar Bill to the “Opening Balance” vendor for the JTD cost. On the item tab enter each Item and the costs on the job profitability detail report and the appropriate Customer/Job. Keep the Billable box checked. On the last line, enter a negative number to the “Opening balance JTD Costs” Item with no customer:job.
This results in no AP balance, leaves no effect on GL, but leaves the correct JTD cost by Item in your Job Cost reports.
Create a new zero-dollar Bill for each active job as of the conversion date.
To enter the JTD Billing for each job:
Enter an Invoice for the Customer:Job for the total Billing-to-date on the job. The Add Time/Costs box will pop up, select the Item tab and bring over all Items to the invoice. You now only have to edit the dollar amounts to agree with your JTD Billing on your Job Profitability Detail report.
Enter a Journal Entry for the total amount of the JTD Billing on the job. The debit is to the “9998 · Conversion – JTD billing” account, leave the Name field blank. The credit is to Accounts Receivable. Select the Customer/Job name in the Name field.
In Receive Payments, enter the Customer/Job, and you will find the above Journal Entry is available as a credit against the Invoice you created above. Apply the Journal Entry to the Invoice.
The net effect on GL is zero, the invoice is paid, and the correct Job-To-Date Billing as of the conversion date will be reflected in your Job Cost reports.
Create a new Invoice, Journal Entry and Receive Payment entry for each active job as of the conversion date.
Run your Job Profitability Detail Reports on the new data file and compare with the same report on the old data file. They should agree. If not, you’ll need to double check your data entry.
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This QuickBooks payroll tip discusses how to create various reports for hours worked before creating paychecks – to ensure that your employees are being paid correctly and that your job costing will be accurate.
An important part of running any business involves keeping track of how many hours your employees work on a specific job and/or task and then accurately paying your employees for those hours. This is especially true for accurate job costing – no matter what type of business you run.
The amount of time spent on record keeping for payroll can be overwhelming for anyone and usually involves multiple people.
This is especially true if you are still using mostly manual methods; for example back when I used to do the payroll for a contractor who had 125 employees working on 5 different jobs – we had a job time sheet for each job every week. The foreman on each job would turn in a handwritten report each week that listed who worked on the job, what their classification was, how many hours they worked each day, etc. Sometimes the employees worked under more than one work classification or task (each involving a different rate of pay) and other times a small group of employees would end up working on all 5 different jobs we had going on during a single workweek – and I would have to take those 5 job time sheets and enter them into QuickBooks in order to run payroll. Not a fun job and highly error prone – especially if I had an issue reading someone’s handwriting!
It’s important to run reports to verify the accuracy of the data entered into the QuickBooks Weekly Timesheet before cutting payroll!
Reports for hours worked to run in QuickBooks before creating paychecks
QuickBooks offers several reports that you can generate and use to verify that employee hours have been entered correctly.
- From the Reports menu
- Choose Jobs, Time & Mileage
- Here you’ll find several “Time by” reports, I like the Time by Job Detail Report
- Set the dates to be the workweek and employee hours by job will be displayed
This by itself is a very useful report, but it only displays the hours and the service item (cost code) that the hours were posted against. My payroll item list was always pretty specific (I named my payroll items by the work classification that the employees worked under) and I wanted to include that information in the Time by Job Detail Report – if your payroll item list is pretty specific; you too can include that information.
- Once the standard Time by Job Detail Report is displayed
- Click the Modify button at the upper right
- In the Display box, place a checkmark next to Payroll Item and click Ok
Once you have this overall report, the possibilities are endless. For example, you can go back into the Modify option and Filter it for a specific job, print it out and give it back to the foreman along with his original timesheet for the job for his approval – get him to sign off on the report.
If you memorize these reports it will make it so much easier for you each week.
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A QuickBooks for contractors tip about issuing joint checks to a subcontractor and a lower tier subcontractor or material supplier for payment for work completed on a construction project.
Quite frequently, in the construction industry, a contractor needs to issue a joint or two-party check to a subcontractor and a lower-tier subcontractor or material supplier for work completed and/or materials delivered to the construction project’s job site.
Unlike many high-end construction accounting packages, QuickBooks doesn’t have a way to handle this automatically — or easily.
This QuickBooks for contractors tip provides what we consider to be a best practice when a situation like this arises.
Problem:
Joe’s General Contracting, Inc. needs to issue a $10,000.00 joint check to Sam Subcontractor AND O’Fallon’s Gravel for sand, gravel, and crushed rock which was delivered to a jobsite. Sam Subcontractor is one of Joe’s regular subcontractors and is already in the QuickBooks Vendor List; O’Fallon’s Gravel is not a normal supplier and is not setup in the Vendor list. Sarah, Joe’s bookkeeper isn’t sure how she should handle a joint check.
Solution:
When Sarah is ready to write the joint or two-party check, she should follow these steps:
- Edit Sam Subcontractors Vendor record in QuickBooks and in the Print on Check as field, she should add AND O’Fallon Gravel. She should also edit the Billed From Address so that it to displays Sam Subcontractor AND O’Fallon Gravel. Clicking the OK button to save her changes.
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- From the Write Checks window, select Sam Subcontractor, enter the dollar amount. In the Memo field type in Joint Check issued to Sam Subcontractor AND O’Fallon Gravel and then job cost as usual.
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- Print just this check.
- Immediately go back to Sam Subcontractors Vendor record and delete all references to O’Fallon Gravel, click OK to save the changes.
- Customize the columns to display in the Vendor Center to include the memo field.
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Make sure that you also have the proper Lien Waive and Release forms.
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A QuickBooks tip for creating a pre-set or memorized Estimate with a standard set of items that will automatically display whenever you create an estimate.
Some contractors, and many other types of businesses as well, frequently prepare an Estimate, Schedule of Values, Proposal, or Quote for different customers that use the exact same items – or groups of items, just with different pricing. Manually creating this same bid over and over by pulling the items into the form is a repetitive and time-consuming task that can easily be automated in QuickBooks by memorizing it.
Follow these simple steps to create a pre-set estimate with standard items and memorize it in QuickBooks
- Pull up a blank estimate form
- Build your bid using Items (cost codes) from your Items List
- Do NOT add any dollar amounts
- Review the basic proposal carefully to make sure that you’ve included all the standard items
- Press the CTRL and “M” keys at the same time (this tells QuickBooks that you want to Memorize the transaction on your screen)
- QuickBooks may present you with a message window that states: When you memorize this estimate, QuickBooks removes the customer:job so that the estimate can be recalled for any customer. Click the OK button.
- Next, a Memorize Transaction window will appear. Use the Name field to hold a description for this quote (Site Work, etc.), select the radio button next to Do Not Remind Me and click the OK button. You can also close the Create Estimate window.
You’ve now created a pre-set Estimate containing standard items that your company uses for bidding.
Using or recalling the memorized Estimate
The next time that you need to create a bid, follow these simple steps:
- Click the Estimates icon from the Home Page OR from the Customers menu choose Estimates OR From the Lists menu -> choose Memorized Transactions OR press the CTRL and the “T” keys at the same time
- Click on the transaction name -> and click the Enter Transaction button
- Select the Customer:Job, review, add any additional/special items for this project, enter pricing, print, and save.
NOTE: Make sure that you always carefully review the information on the form before you print it to make sure that all of the required items, specific to this job have been included. You can add or remove items from the base group that you initially memorized.
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This QuickBooks payroll tip discusses how to correct payroll hours incorrectly charged to a job after paychecks have been created and cashed.
Accurately job costing payroll hours and wages is critical for many business types, not just contractors. The information that is entered in QuickBooks Weekly Timesheets and paychecks is only as good as the information that is received from those who are responsible for providing the payroll clerk with the original employee hours spend on various jobs. However, we are all human and, therefore, make mistakes, some mistakes can be corrected more easily than others.
A common mistake that can occur is the reporting of employee payroll hours on one job – - when those hours really should have been reported on another job; for example it was originally reported that employee John Doe worked 20 hours on Job A – in reality those 20 hours were spent on Job B. Quite often this error is reported to the payroll clerk after paychecks have already been processed and the checks have been cashed.
Quite often this situation puts the payroll clerk in a quandary about how to correct payroll hours incorrectly charged to a job.
When the error just involves changing a job {moving the hours from Job A to Job B} and does not involve also having to change a rate of pay; the easiest way to correct payroll hours incorrectly charged to a job is to edit both the timesheet and paycheck detail for the employee and change the job there.
When you edit both the timesheet and the paycheck detail, change the job, and then save your changes, QuickBooks will throw out some warning messages – don’t worry, for once it is ok to ignore these messages. Usually it’s not a good idea to ignore warning messages.
Another situation in which this type of correction can occur is when payroll is being processed, using time data entered in the Weekly Timesheet, and the payroll clerk is verifying the hours entered in QuickBooks against the timecards from the field, she discovers that the timesheet referenced Job A and it should have been Job B. The initial reaction is to just go ahead and make the change in the paycheck detail and call it good. However, what many people do not realize is that when you make a change in the paycheck, while processing payroll, the original timesheet entry is not updated to reflect this updated information – you must also go back and correct the job assignment in the timesheet.
Recap: If it’s just a change in job and not a change in hourly rate/wages; edit both the timesheet and the paycheck detail and make the change. That is the easiest thing to do to correct payroll hours incorrectly charged to a job when it doesn’t have an impact on wages.
