Top 10 Thursday features 10 of the most interesting articles that I found the previous week. There is so much news and information available on the web – it’s difficult to read everything and stay up to date. As I read articles on the web – I’ll share some that I feel are important.
General Business:
- Losing focus? 9 ways to concentrate at work
- Why to-do lists set you up for failure
- Have a pet? Perhaps they can help you out at work {sorry this is just a really cute YouTube video}
Bookkeeping, Accounting, Payroll & Taxes
Construction News
- Checking and Documenting Federal Debarment Status of Vendors
- Asphalt group questions life-cycle cost analysis procedures
- Check out the January issue of Construction Digital
Marketing & Social Media
- 8 Easy Ways to Boost Your Website on a Budget
- Easy Tips for Smart Social Media Strategy {YouTube video}
Well, there’s our Top 10 most interesting articles for last week – do you have some interesting news that you’d like to share?
Keeping track of bookkeeping/accounting tasks and the information that is required when you hire a new employee can be pretty overwhelming for a business owner or bookkeeper. In the normal rush of day-to-day activities; sometimes important items can get overlooked and come back to bite you later.
Welcome to Tuesday Training!
Tuesday Training is a new feature here on the QuickBooks for Contractors blog. While everyday focuses on training of one sort or another, Tuesday’s are dedicated to more in-depth training.
We’ll teach you the things you need to know about using QuickBooks, that you won’t find in the QuickBooks Help file, in order to successfully run your construction business and obtain accurate job costing reports; from eBooks, live webinars, and recorded training sessions.
You’ll find high-quality (budget friendly) training without having to leave the comfort of your home or office.
Bookkeeping & Accounting Tasks
We’ve compiled a list of daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual bookkeeping and accounting tasks to help you stay on track – this is also a handy checklist to provide to a new bookkeeper.
This list is geared for contractors and include items such as certified payroll reports, AIA billing draws, Worker’s Comp, and General Liability Insurance tracking reminders.
Excel format, so you can easily add other items and customize it to meet the needs of your business.
We hope that you’ve found today’s Tuesday Training items to be helpful to your business – if so please take a moment to leave a comment or share this with others on your favorite social media network using the buttons below
Download your free copy of our Bookkeeping and Accounting Tasks checklist here.
Employee New Hire Packet
What should a “New Hire Packet” contain? Federal W-4, State W-4, and Form I-9 at a minimum – but that really isn’t enough information to keep on file. You, as well as your bookkeeper needs to have more information about a new employee than what is available on these forms. Utilize our New Hire Checklist” to provide your bookkeeper with additional information about the employee.
Word format, so you can easily add additional information and customize it to suit the needs of your business.
Download your free copy of our Employee New Hire Packet by clicking here.
We hope that you’ve found today’s Tuesday Training items to be helpful to your business – if so please take a moment to leave a comment or share this with others on your favorite social media network using the buttons below.
Working with taxable and non-taxable items and customers in QuickBooks sometimes just freaks people out and causes them to over think the entire situation. I’m frequently asked how to do this by people who are setting up our AIA billing program – here’s a question that I received recently.
I am getting ready to set the AIA billing program {Construction Application for Payment Solution} up tomorrow and just have a few questions.
Should the income items each be posted to an income general ledger account? Or will I use the subtotal line to point to an income account? If I have to post each income item to an income account – I will have to do 2 sets of them, one for wholesale (no tax) and one for retail (taxable) and I would like to avoid this if possible. I guess though we will have to post them to an income account…..thoughts?
Should we use the group items to setup our labor and materials for the schedule of values? For example, when we bill the customer- we only want DEMOLITION to show up, but for our purposes we have the DEMOLITION broken into labor and material. It seems like this would be a good place to use group items?
Each of your QuickBooks Items/Cost Codes should be set up and linked to BOTH and Income and an Expense/Cost of Goods Sold Account otherwise you’ll never get any decent job costing reports.
Subtotal Items do not link to either an Income or an Expense Account – they simply add up the numbers above it and display the amount on the Estimate and Progress Invoices that you create.
Unless you want to track Wholesale and Retail Income individually on your Profit & Loss Report, there is no need to create two sets of Items. QuickBooks can handle both taxable and non-taxable customers and sales using the same item list. You’ll just want to make sure that you have two Sales Tax Items – one that actually charges the Sales Tax Rate and one that has a 0% rate for Non-taxable sales.
Below is a YouTube video that demonstrates the procedure and shows you what your Sales Tax Liability Report will look like if you do it correctly.
As for using group items to track labor and materials for a specific cost code, there are a couple of different options that you could use, depending upon the amount of detail that you want to track. But group items are definitely the way to go if you want to job cost more information than you want the customer to see.
I hope you’ve found this article to be informative, if so please take a moment to leave a comment or share it with others on your favorite social media network using the buttons below.
Payroll can be one of the most complex duties of any bookkeeper’s job – especially when you need to OR want to track your Worker’s Compensation costs for job costing purposes and pay your employees Vacation, Holiday and Overtime wages. Just take a look at this question, submitted by one of our blog subscribers!
I have set up the Workers Compensation tracking in QuickBooks for a construction company with no problem, it seems to be working fine. My question is – how do you keep track of Holiday, Vacation, and Overtime pay? Do I set up each payroll item with the Workers Comp {WC} rate for each class? For example Carpenter-Holiday and Carpenter-Vacation? Thanks, Kathleen
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Answer:
Hi Kathleen;
That’s an excellent question!
One of the first things that you should do is contact your Worker’s Compensation Insurance carrier and ask them if there is a reduced Worker’s Comp rate for when you pay your field workers for non-field related time such as Vacation or Holiday pay. I once asked this question of the Insurance underwriter and much to my surprise he told me {grudgingly} that Vacation and Holiday pay for field employees was computed at a lower experience rate than their normal wages; mainly because there was “no risk” involved for those wages – he quickly followed this up with “but this will involve more tracking on your part” for the annual audit/review.
The QuickBooks payroll module is pretty darn flexible; but like the rest of the program it’s generic – so sometimes it’s a little “lacking” when it comes to some specific things like the situation above.
Even if I didn’t fall into the special situation of a reduced WC Experience Rate for Holiday and Vacation time, I would still create specific payroll items based on Work Classification/type of wage: so Carpenter-Holiday or Carpenter-Vacation would be the way I would go.
Overtime can get tricky, especially if your contractor client works on prevailing wage jobs and pays the fringe benefit portion of the prevailing wage in cash to the employee as part of the hourly gross wage, QuickBooks will need some “help” when determining the overtime rate. {This becomes complex and cannot be explained in a blog post but I plan on providing a fee-based live and pre-recorded webinar on how to set this up and make it work in QuickBooks – which will be available in January 2012}.
You will need to add an “Overtime” payroll item to your Payroll Item List using either the E-Z Setup or Custom Setup method naming them Carpenter OT, Laborer OT, etc and being sure that you select that the type of wage is an Overtime rate. If the premium OR half-time portion of overtime pay is excluded from Worker’s Compensation tracking, make sure that you have checked that option in the Workers Compensation preference; found from the Edit menu -> Preferences -> Payroll & Employees -> Workers Compensation button and checking the option to “Exclude overtime premium from Workers Comp calculation”
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Make sure that your Codes in the Workers Comp List are descriptive – meaning that when you choose the WC Code in Weekly timesheets that you will understand what code is being assigned to what payroll item.
Setting things up in this manner will provide you with all the payroll numbers that you will need during an audit and clearly indicate the type of wages that are being paid.
If you feel this QuickBooks Payroll tip has been helpful, please take a moment to leave us a comment or to share it with others on your favorite Social Networking site 
An “audit trail” for Accounts Receivable in QuickBooks is only one of the many complexities faced by government construction contractors. Running any sort of construction business can be difficult – but the amount of paperwork, the level of detail, and the additional requirements for a government contractor can cause 2 and sometimes 3 times the amount for a bookkeeper. Below is a question submitted by a reader named Shirley.
We are a Construction Company and do government contracting. Is it possible to use the Accounts Receivable Summary to track each Project and the invoices when received and when paid. It has been several years since I have used QuickBooks and have never used the Construction Version. We have QuickBooks 2011 Premier Construction.
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First, let me say that the Contractor version doesn’t work any differently than the Pro – it just has some built-in construction specific reports and other features that aren’t available in other versions. So your learning curve shouldn’t be difficult at all! That’s the good news
As for using the Accounts Receivable Summary Report as an audit trail, personally I don’t think I would use that because it wouldn’t give me the detail that I would want – OR – that I “think” you are looking for. The A/R Summary report only shows you how much {total} money is overdue in 30, 60, and 90 day increments. This information may meet your needs if you just need to know how much money is how many days overdue by job.
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My own personal preference, would be to know which invoices were how many days past due; therefore, I would rather run the Accounts Receivable Aging Detail to determine exactly which invoices where outstanding.
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Both of these reports would provide me with information about just a specific job – each could be modified and filtered for a specific job or jobs.
Another very good report, especially if you are concerned about a specific job, is the Customer Open Balance Report {available from the actual QuickBooks job record and choosing Open Balance}.
Another alternative to obtain this information easily, without running and printing reports – would be to customize how job record information is displayed in QuickBook, that way anyone who has access to this type of information can easily see it without having to run, print, and then distribute reports. Remember, it’s all about efficiency and streamlining the workload/work flow. Customizing how information is displayed in the job record let’s you quickly see how much total money is outstanding for a specific job, when invoices were created {dated}, the date you anticipate receiving the money, how many days outstanding the money is, what the invoice was issued for and the open balance.
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For tracking Vendor costs you could run a Job Cost by Job and Vendor Detail, click the Modify Report button and customize it like the screenshot below:
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QuickBooks can do many things, including provide you with an “audit trail” for Accounts Receivable and Accounts Payable. You just have to get in there an poke around and see what works for you.
While the information provided about may not answer the original question to the 100% satisfaction of the person asking it, based on the information provided it should at least provide you with things to look at and modify to best meet your needs.
If you found this tip to be helpful, please take a moment to leave a comment or share it on your favorite social network.
