Job costing in Quickbooks - problem with Journals

Job costing in Quickbooks - problem with Journals

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I have recommended Quickbooks to deliver contract profitability information and am working with the local Quickbooks expert to define and implement the system.

The client is a consulting business. Revenue comes from selling time from their own employees and from contractors along with travel expenses etc.
Billing is loosely based on days worked in the month on each contract but there are subjective decisions to be made about how much will be billed each month.
Invoice generation and the presentation of detail will always be a human activity although it would be useful to get a computer generated list of days and expenses etc recorded against each contract as part of the monthly billing review.
Contract profitability is key to meaningful reporting and we will be charging time at a standard cost for directors and employees to each contract based on a 'billable time' percentage (and a notional salary for the directors).
Transaction volumes are low - difficult to imagine more than ten active contracts at one time - but individual transaction values are very high.

Generating sales invoices is no problem, entering contractors' invoices as 'bills' at the job level is no problem but we have hit a problem in recording time costs for employees.

It does not seem possible to enter costs against a job using a journal.
I just can't believe that this is correct and have tried without success to get advice from Quickbooks themselves. (I've started another thread about the support issue.)

How can a job-based system operate for any business with this gap?
Surely a manufacturing operation would need to record consumption of various internal resources against each job - time in each cost centre being an obvious one.
Can anyone on the list suggest how to get around this problem?

We have discounted using the timesheet process which is hours based, tied to cost-plus reimbursible contracts and seems to be add nothing other than additional steps and potential confusion.

Is there any other software out there that could deal with what I regard as a very simple business need? (Please don't suggest SAP etc - we're in not in that league)

Suggestions appreciated.

Profitfinder

Replies (8)

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By User deleted
20th Oct 2004 12:01

Entering costs to jobs at the item level
I too believe that Quickbooks is an excellent product and great value for money - which is why I have recommended it so often in the past.

The client that triggered my original posting has been very pleased with the initial 'this is how it will look' reports showing contract profitability based on a month's live data. The issue has been the hoops that we must jump through to get internal cost data into comprehensive and reliable reports.

I am told that the reports that we want to use only include data that has been entered at the item level - and that journals can only be coded to the account code within the job so they will not show on the reports even though they are coded correctly to the jobs. Therefore, to get internal costs into the reports we must use 'bills' to a dummy vendor on the Purchase Ledger and then perform some magic to remove the creditors entry.

I don't think I made a good job of describing the problem originally. Sorry for that - my experience of QB has been as a consumer of reports presented by people who know how to use the system.

I am very confident that my local QB expert is correct in what they say about the problem, but hope that the larger community may be able to suggest some better form of work-around to get the data loaded or enhanced reporting to include everything coded to the job from whatever source.

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By carnmores
20th Oct 2004 15:47

No David
i know that you are coverted!

Pathfinder i still do not see what your problem is you seem to be trashing around a bit; remember that you can design your own report quite easily so that may be another option to look at.

if you let us know in more detail i am sure that lots of us would be delighted to help

[email protected]

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By carnmores
18th Oct 2004 12:20

what?
what version of quickbooks are you using, i presume that it is is either 2003 or 2004 and i have had no problem entering a journal against a job so i may have misunderstood your question.

simply enter the job name in the name column and it appears on all reports. there are other ways of doing it as well which may make automated invoicing easier as well so let me know how you get on.

also the time bit works as well so maybe your clients just aint got the hang of it yet.

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By carnmores
19th Oct 2004 09:39

David
i only leap to its defence because it actually does what it says on the box and some people refuse to believe it! look at all your articles on sage exporting thats not on the box.

the package i am currently looking at is Mamut and it looks better than good but more on that from you later David hopefully.


i shall try and find and look at exchequer as well but expect its a bit more costly?

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By David Carter
19th Oct 2004 22:29

Misunderstood
Nicholas,
I think you have slightly got the wrong end of the stick. I wish to defend QuickBooks and was saying that I agree with you on this one.

I cannot understand Pathfinder's problem - on my version of QuickBooks the "Name" field in General Journals is as plain as a pikestaff.

Everyone seems to think I have a down on QuickBooks but actually I'm a big fan of it for Costing - at only £250 or so it's the obvious first choice. I mentioned Exchequer simply because Pathfinder's last paragraph asked for the names of some other packages.

Interested to hear of your views on Mamut. Any chance of going public some time?

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By David Carter
18th Oct 2004 19:23

Seems OK to me
Keen as always to leap to QuickBooks' defence, I have to agree with Nicholas. Looking right now at the Company - Make General Journal Entries screen, the fields to be filled in are:
Account - Debit - Credit - VAT - VAT Amount - Memo - Name - Class

The Job goes into the "Name" field. (This is QuickBooks Premier.)

Don't know about Timesheets. As to alternative packages, I've installed Exchequer Enterprise Job Costing and found it very good.

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By carnmores
21st Oct 2004 17:52

David re your comments below
It is a problem in QuickBooks that there is no report which lists all
the costs appertaining to a job from whatever source. This was discussed
in articles 128627

i dont agree with this statement, thought we had cleared this up.

sorry to have missed you at softworld

i still do not understand profitminders problem either but am here if help is required

[email protected]

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By David Carter
20th Oct 2004 23:54

Still struggling to understand
Pathfinder, I think I may know what your problem is what still can't understand your description. E.g.:

"and that journals can only be coded to the account code within the job so they will not show on the reports even though they are coded correctly to the jobs."

I can't make sense of this. Can you you give us a worked example, please?

Perhaps you are saying that the job code CAN be attached to an item line in General Journals, but doesn't appear in the reports.

It is a problem in QuickBooks that there is no report which lists all the costs appertaining to a job from whatever source. This was discussed in articles 128627 and 130162 .

In particular look at the reply in the second one from Alex Blakey, who is Intuit's product specialist on the Costing side. I haven't been able to work through his solution myself yet, but it looks fairly involved!

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