QuickBooks Tip – Purchase Orders & Estimates Posting Status

When a Purchase Order, or even an Estimate, actually posts to your accounting and/or job costing numbers sometimes causes confusion for QuickBooks Users.

For example – as a contractor you issue a Purchase Order for $10,000.00 to a subcontractor for excavation work on one of your projects.  The Purchase Order becomes part of your accounting records, you can pull it up and look at it ….. but now you are left wondering how does the cost of that subcontract get into your job costing for the project.  Is it when the PO is created or when you post the subcontractors invoice (bill) against the PO.

Both Purchase Orders and Estimates are non-posting transactions, meaning that you can created them, save them, print them, and even distribute them; but in reality they don’t “do” anything except sit there….waiting for the next thing to happen.

That next “thing” involves you receiving a bill (subcontractor invoice) against the PO or the act of creating a progress invoice to a customer from the Estimate.

This is when the costs and/or income hit your job costing reports.

Now, there are some setup requirements in order to make this all work;  and work correctly –

• each of your items has to be set up to capture both the cost (or expense) and the income.