Opinion: How good is QuickBooks at Job Costing?

Reports / P&L detail / Filter NAMES / choose job name.

i will have to think and play a bit more, but there is a way, reports/vat/vatdetail and you are nearly there

any good?

go to grangeworth kitchens
hit the invoice button and add an item
for say carolyn lesley

hit save and new and then go back to that invoice and go to the 'journal' on the invoice bar

is this what you are looking for?

Peter, if you scroll back to my previous comment, you will see that by running a P & L report, with colmns set for job, you will get the level of detail that you require.

Similiar listings can be achieved that match "day-book" type listings.

The export to excel is a red herring, you have to format the report in QuickBooks first, as that is what is expoprted.

john@advicefromjohn.com

run a p/l report for the period concerned and double click on the total income or go to

report
custom transaction detail

filter transaction type to 'invoice'
filter account to 'account receivable'

hey pesto again
memorise as sales day book!

ARE WE THERE YET?

Thanks again - yes I have been using the transaction report and filtering on invoice and account for some time. I don't know whether I am being particularly slow but I cannot show Gross VAT and Net for each invoice only the Total. The P+L report only shows Net of course.

Janet

please also have a think about stock, if you are suppling from stock, then it is almost impossible to link it to a supplier where more than one supplier supplies the same goods

But how (she wails) does one produce a day book? Try as I might, using the transaction listing, I can't get a simple report that is foolproof!

Thanks

Janet

I have used MYOB for a number of years now and find it easy to job track on it - it easily generates job reports. I would recommend checking it out. It is also one of the few programs I have found that is Mac compatible; when is Sage going to release a Mac version??

On the Intuit Web-site, there appears to be a Contractors add-on. I am thinking of buying this for a Contracting client. Is this a good idea?

I think the main problem is with the terminology. For example, in Grangeworth Kitchens, if you run a P & L account, and set the columns to "Customer: Job" you get a P & L per job. This is an excellent check at the end of posting, because the last column is "No Name" so you can check that there aren't any postings unallocated to jobs. There is the usual drill down facility.
If you want a specific job report, after checking for completeness of postings, then just go into Modify on report writer.
Go to the "filters" screen. On that screen, apply filters to "Name". There you have a subscreen that gives the ability to select specific jobs, together with the ability to define date ranges on the main report.
All of these reports are exportable to Excel if you wish to play around further with the information.
To my mind this beats Sage hands down. But like any system, you have to do a certain amount of checking on your input, i.e. checking for "No name" inputs, amd periods.
If I am missing the boat here, or anyone wants any help, then feel free to e mail me on john@advicefromjohn.com

If anyone wants anymore help, then e-mail me.

Although I am a fan of quickbooks for some clients there can be a lot of little difficulties. Although it is advertised as being great for people with no accounting experience a lovely mess can be created that is time consuming for us, and therefore expensive for the client, to solve. We discovered a gremlin in quickbooks VAT reporting last year - and this was after the enhancements that were supposed to clear up all the earlier problems and it took quite a while to identify the problem. Although it is good, there are some really basic reports that would be great to see, eg A really simple Invoices Issued Report showing Gross VAT NET across columns without the split to VAT being on a separate line. The simple reports are often the ones that help clients to understand where they are going wrong. Does anyone else agree?

you say

'Go into Reports-Jobs and Time. Within this menu there are no less than 11 reports, but none of them give a simple list of transactions. In fact all of them seem to be summary reports.

One of them does have an encouraging name, Job Profitability Detail, but in fact it’s not a detail report at all. It’s just another summary report, this time by type of expense. It’s true you can double-click on to a total and see a list of the transactions that make it up. But even then the list doesn’t show the name of the supplier and you have to double click laboriously on to each item to see who the invoice was from'

For example filter out all jobs except carolyn leslie, double click on the net figure, then go to modify dislay and tick source name, if you scroll down the report you will see, hey presto, a supplier!

remember to differentiate bought in goods from manufactured items when looking at your report AND also if you are using stock it will not be 'allocated' to a supplier for obvious reasons

you may also want to look at company reports p/l by job same sort of thing applies and it gives you your job by job report in all the detail you require, very simple

i havent answered any other points on the hubristic grounds that there is probably another easy answer

i admit there are a few quirks but they are nothing like you are suggesting, its a mindset thing!

email me if you wish and try QB 2004 please!!

finally i think that Chris is wrong also, if you enter all rechargeable expenses correctly i have never come across a time when they have not been properly recharged so i dont understand his comments

nick@carnmores.co.uk

i installed QB at a clients and the bookkeeper couldnt get her head around it until she saw a day book.

these are now unnecessary but it very simple to produce such a list if you want it and it is useful for checking the invoice numbering yes!

the VAT quarterly function in QB 2004 is excellent whereas 2003 wasnt great...

I have been struggling with Sage Job Costing and exactly the same problem.

I cannot seem to get a simple list of sales invoices and purchase invoices / expenses on the same page with a total at the bottom,

Any ideas??

Thanks in advance/

If you were to use classes as a method of analysis, you are easily able to get a 'per class' profit and loss. This in turn will give you all the main headings you want to drill down to in any area you wish. You can easily export this list to Excel and delete the rows you don't want.
This would show the suppliers you so desperatly want to view. You can choose one or all of the classes, so it is very easy to get the report you need.
I use classes a lot with my clients, as it is a very simple way of job costing. You have an extra box to put data into, but the rewards far outweigh any time spent in the data entry.
Hope this helps. Shelagh Whiteman

We abandoned QB for project costing because of uncertainty as to whether a particular cost would get picked up by the costing system. There are some screens which allow you to enter a job reference against a cost but when you look at the recharging of the costs to clients they do not appear. Too risky.

This is a shame because QB is in other respects a friendly product to use.

i agree that classes are a good idea but there are a couple of limitation and are difficult to use with jobs as well as reports cannot be 3 dimensional

1) you cannot use the costs recharge facility on classes alone, which is one of the main drawbacks, and i have yet to find a way to budget classes and jobs at the same time

2) if you forget to classify something they can be easily excluded, this is a slightly different problem to no job allocation. it is therefore advisable to have a 'house' class so that you have made a positive attempt to classify rather than have it report as unclassified

3) if you have a lot of jobs i think jobs are better than classes and they have the added bonus of being differentiable by status, ie awarded, in progress, finalised billed; you can also change these characteristics so something else for David C to look at!

Nick