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Tips for Effectively Using QuickBooks Purchase Orders

Published March 19, 2015 | By Nancy Smyth

Using Purchase Orders in QuickBooks can help you to ensure that your Subcontractors or Material Suppliers do not charge you more than what they originally quoted you for a price and the Open Purchase Order by Job Report can help you to see how much in committed costs there are left on your jobs. Both very valuable pieces of information.

Having said that, you do have to use the QuickBooks Purchase Order function correctly and there are several pitfalls that can happen, that you will want to avoid.

This post provides you with tips for effectively using QuickBooks Purchase Orders as well as entering Bills against those Purchase Orders.

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QuickBooks 2015 Announced – Important System Requirements

Published September 9, 2014 | By Nancy Smyth

For anyone out there reading this post, if you are still running a Windows XP machine - or have clients running XP - DO NOT UPGRADE to QuickBooks 2015 until you've purchased a new computer! And in my opinion, you should spend the extra money and buy a Windows 7 machine and skip Windows 8 - but that is just my opinion.

Office 365 is supported for basic Word and Excel integration, but the Outlook Sync is not. Additionally, if you rely on QuickBooks Statement Writer, neither Office 2013 or Office 365 is supported.

QuickBooks Add-On Developers, such as ourselves, do not have access to QuickBooks 2015 as yet.

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How do Amazon Merchants Reconcile in QuickBooks? Webinar

Published September 5, 2014 | By Roxanne Brown
One of the biggest struggles for merchants that sell on Amazon Seller Central; or participate in Amazon FBA is how to reconcile their orders with the payments received. Amazon pays their merchants either weekly, bi-weekly, or in some rare cases daily. The majority of merchants I work with are paid bi-weekly or weekly. They also combine all types of payments in your settlement; making it almost impossible to truly see the details behind Seller Central versus FBA sales.
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Simple Controls You Can Put Into Place to Discourage Fraud

Published June 4, 2014 | By Nancy Smyth
As a business owner, there are many simple controls that you can put into place to discourage fraud from happening. Small business owners never intend to leave their doors wide open to theft and white collar crime – it just sort of happens; and unfortunately, small businesses have every reason to be concerned about fraud. Fraud is often a cost of doing business that is hidden from view and unfortunately most business owners only know about fraud only when it's discovered; after the fact and then it is sometimes too late to do anything. Eliminating fraud completely isn't possible, but with reasonable actions made by the business owner, it's impact can be limited. Preventing fraud from occurring in the first place, however, is a win-win situation.
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Is Managing QuickBooks Purchase Orders Driving You Insane?

Published May 6, 2014 | By Nancy Smyth
We have one vendor that we buy the majority of our materials from, so we have a lot of different Purchase Orders for that vendor. My problem is, a lot of times our Subcontractors or Vendors don’t reference our Purchase Order number on their invoices, only the job – so I have a hard time figuring out which of the Purchase Orders the bill belongs to. I’ve created Excel spreadsheets for each job which lists all of the Vendors we’ve created Purchase Orders for, the Purchase Order Number, cost/Item code, the amount of the PO, when we received the bill from the Vendor, and whether or not the PO was received in full or not. This worked fairly well, for awhile, but now it’s driving me insane! Is there anyway that I can get rid of my spreadsheets and track the job and cost codes for my Purchase Orders in QuickBooks?
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Technology is Changing How We Submit Certified Payroll Reports

Published April 8, 2014 | By Nancy Smyth
Technology - computers, software, and the internet - has changed how we create and submit certified payroll reports over the last decade. Today, there are now one or more agencies in 17 states that require certified payroll reports to be electronically submitted via numerous on-line labor compliance programs. Isn't it time that you started really automating your certified payroll tasks?
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Are Your QuickBooks Payroll & Certified Payroll Processes Efficient?

Published February 12, 2014 | By Nancy Smyth
Ask any business owner how efficient he thinks his payroll and certified payroll processes are and I'm betting he'll either say "oh they are very efficient" or "they could be better". I attended a really great webinar called "A Tale of Two Payroll Processes" a couple of weeks ago, hosted by CPA Practice Advisor and presented by TSheets.  During this webinar I learned some alarming facts that immediately took me back about 15 years to a time when I was doing a ton of payroll and certified payroll processes manually and literally wanted to tear my hair out.
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QuickBooks Tip: How to find “Notes” after an Upgrade

Published January 22, 2014 | By Nancy Smyth
If you are anything like me, you've kept notes about Customers, Vendors, and Employees in QuickBooks for years - sometimes these notes were just little things like the name and extension of the really on the ball sales rep of your biggest vendor, the architect name and phone number for a job, or when an employee reached a specific milestone like change apprentice levels.  These notes were clearly visible when we looked at the employee, vendor, customer or job record and helped us to see or find these little tidbits easily. New versions of QuickBooks still contain our notes - they just aren't readily available when we click on an employee, vendor, customer or job record.  This post is about a QuickBooks tip on finding employee, vendor and customer notes after upgrading to a new version of QuickBooks.
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QuickBooks Tip: How to Calculate Over/Under Billings

Published January 10, 2014 | By Nancy Smyth
You can easily calculate Over/Under Billings and Percent Complete from QuickBooks data IF:
  • You create an Estimate for EVERY job/project
  • You've modified the QuickBooks Estimate Template to include Cost and Markup columns and you utilize those columns when building your Estimate
  • All of your "Items" have been set-up to capture BOTH revenue and costs (double-sided items)
  • You enter ALL job related employee time and vendor costs using double-sided items
  • You create Job Types for Over/Under and Completed (with sub-types for years) and assign them correctly to your jobs
IF all of these things are currently in place in your QuickBooks file, this is how you can create a simple Over/Under Billing Report with Percent Complete WITHOUT hours of manual calculations.  To learn how, read the full blog post.
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About Your Host:

Nancy Smyth, Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor

Nancy Smyth, Sunburst Software Solutions, Inc.
QuickBooks Construction & Payroll Expert


I've been using and supporting QuickBooks products since the early 1990's. I've worked with thousands of contractors, assisting them with QuickBooks setup, Certified Payroll Reporting requirements, AIA Billing and Weighted-Average Overtime.


QuickBooks is a powerful product, but learning how to use it in your construction business can be difficult. I hope you find resources available here to be helpful.

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