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Many businesses think estimating is useful to only construction companies. But any company that produces estimates, quotes, bids, and proposals can use QuickBooks to get a handle on their job costing. The accuracy of your estimating process can make or break your project success. It is critical because if your estimate is too high you might lose the job, while estimates that are too low can reduce your profits or even make you lose money on a job.

However, you can reduce your risk and increase profits by using QuickBooks for estimating. Even if you don’t provide your clients with estimates, you need to enter them in order to get the most out of the QuickBooks job costing reports. These reports, especially the Job Estimates vs. Actuals reports, are the key to making sure your existing job budgets are on track. They are also important when evaluating the accuracy of your estimates so you can make adjustments for future projects. They are also required if you want to do progress invoicing.

This is the second of a four-part series about how to use QuickBooks for job costing. Intuit, the creators of QuickBooks, has also asked me to present a series of free Small Business Town Hall covering the same topics every Tuesday this month. This is your chance to get your job costing questions answered live. You can get more information here:

http://www.theqbspecialists.com/quickbooks_training.php

Setting Up Estimates

1. Turn on the Estimate function at Preferences > Jobs & Estimates.

2. Create service items that match your project phases at Lists > Item List. You might also want to create sub-categories for materials and labor for tracking purposes, and use groups (see below) so they don’t show up separately on your estimates and invoices.

Continue reading ‘How to Use QuickBooks for Job Costing: Working with Estimates’ »

We’ve been seeing a surge in corrupted QuickBooks data files lately. Here are some of the signs that you’ve got a problem:

- Error messages, such as “Company file in use, please wait”, invalid protection faults, fatal or unrecoverable errors
- Transactions can’t be saved or QuickBooks suddenly shuts down when saving a transaction
- Incorrect data on reports, such as missing transactions, negative amounts in accounts that should be positive, unbalanced balance sheets, etc.
- Missing accounts on your chart of accounts or missing names on your lists

Not experiencing any of these problems yet? Press F2 to open the Product Information screen and check the number to the right of DB File Fragments – if it’s higher than 10 it’s just a matter of time.

It’s extremely important not to ignore the signs because once a file is corrupted your company file may suddenly freeze up and won’t open. In this case, you usually have no choice but to either restore a backup (you are backing up your QuickBooks file often, right?) or send the file to Intuit’s data recovery team which offers no guarantee and often had a 2 week backlog. If you’re in a hurry (and, really, who can afford to be without their file for 2 weeks?) they do offer to expedited service for $750.

Sound unappealing? You may want to start proactively working on keeping your QuickBooks data file healthy. One of the easiest ways is to frequently verify your data. You can do this manually at File > Utilities > Verify Data but it’s even better if you run it as part of a regular QuickBooks backup. QuickBooks makes it easy by automatically reminding you to back up your file after a certain number of company file closes. For instance, if you want to verify once a week and you open your file once per day, you can set QuickBooks to backup with complete verification (this is important) when you close your company file 5 times. You can set your options at File > Save Copy or Backup, select Backup copy and click on Options.

But, you say, you regularly backup all your computer files every single night – why do you need to backup through QuickBooks too? While this a wonderful practice, and if you ever need to restore a backup you’ll be glad you do, it’s doing nothing at all to help keep your QuickBooks file healthy. Though you can manually verify your data, why not schedule a backup reminder from right within QuickBooks? Not to mention you can never have too many backups.

Continue reading ‘QuickBooks Tip: Fixing Corrupted Data Files’ »

Many businesses think estimating is useful to only construction companies. But any company that produces estimates, quotes, bids, and proposals can use QuickBooks to get a handle on their job costing. The accuracy of your estimating process can make or break your project success. It is critical because if your estimate is too high you might lose the job, while estimates that are too low can reduce your profits or even make you lose money on a job.

However, you can reduce your risk and increase profits by using QuickBooks for estimating. Even if you don’t provide your clients with estimates, you need to enter them in order to get the most out of the QuickBooks job costing reports. These reports, especially the Job Estimates vs. Actuals reports, are the key to making sure your existing job budgets are on track. They are also important when evaluating the accuracy of your estimates so you can make adjustments for future projects. They are also required if you want to do progress invoicing.

This is the second of a four-part series about how to use QuickBooks for job costing. Intuit, the creators of QuickBooks, has also asked me to present a series of free Small Business Town Hall covering the same topics every Tuesday this month. This is your chance to get your job costing questions answered live. You can get more information here:

http://www.theqbspecialists.com/quickbooks_training.php

Setting Up Estimates

1. Turn on the Estimate function at Preferences > Jobs & Estimates.

2. Create service items that match your project phases at Lists > Item List. You might also want to create sub-categories for materials and labor for tracking purposes, and use groups (see below) so they don’t show up separately on your estimates and invoices.

3. Create group items for items that you often sell together, this speeds up data entry and also allows you to hide details on estimates and invoices. For example, you could make an “Cabinets” group by grouping the items for all the materials and labor used. Each item in the Cabiets group has its own cost and selling price. When you choose an item for your estimate or invoice, you simply have to enter a quantity to get the total price for cabinets. You can also choose to not include the detail on your estiates and invoices by not checking the “Print items in group” box.

4. Customize your estimates by clicking on the Customize button at the top of the Estimate form, then selecting Additional Customization.

5. You can create multiple estimate forms for different needs and manage them at Lists > Templates.

6. You can also memorize completed estimates that you use that you use frequently by going to Edit > Memorize Estimate. You can also duplicate estimates at Edit > Duplicate Invoice.

7. You can download free customized estimate templates from Intuit at: http://community.intuit.com/library/forms.

Continue reading ‘How to Use QuickBooks for Job Costing: Working with Estimates’ »