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When I say labor, I mean employees you pay on payroll for job or project related labor. You can avoid a lot of data entry by using the bank feeds to import transactions if you aren’t using the items to record costs.įor me personally, the biggest issue is the job costing of labor. QuickBooks Online, however, has a very impressive Projects Dashboard. In addition to what I’ve described here, it features much more extensive reporting - not to mention seamless reporting capabilities for Job Costing. In Summary, job costing in QuickBooks Desktop is item-based. If you are familiar with them in QuickBooks Desktop and you do over/under billing Work In Progress adjustments, you might really miss these, to name a few: There are a few very important reports that, unfortunately, just aren’t available in QuickBooks Online. It might sound like kind of a pain, but this works just fine for most contractors. Actual report is NOT available from the Projects dashboard and will require some customizing. Actual reports, though, you’ll need to also create a Budget with the cost-code level detail of the estimated costs. To create Progress Invoices, you’ll want to create an Estimate:
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You can access your Job Profitability report from right inside the Project dashboard - as you’ll see, it’s essentially a Profit and Loss for the job: On the other hand, your Job Cost reports are a bit different. If you do lump sum invoicing, it may be just an item or two. In QuickBooks Online, your cost of goods sold accounts will represent your cost codes - meaning you could have dozens or even hundreds of COGS accounts:ĭepending on how you invoice your clients, your Item list may also represent your cost codes. This then results in a lot of data entry, negating one of the best features of QuickBooks Online. You can use the items to record costs, but you can’t choose them when entering transactions from the bank feeds. The items are only used for estimates and invoicing. Actual available in QuickBooks Desktop) are based on the cost of goods sold accounts. In QuickBooks Online, the Job Profitability Report and the Job Budgets vs Actual (which is as close as we can get to the Estimates vs. In most cases, there’s no need to enter the costs to the items, because there aren’t any item-based job cost reports. In QuickBooks Online, the items - called Products and Services - play a much smaller role. Your job cost reports look something like this: Meanwhile, your item list will look something like this (except usually, it will be a lot longer): Your cost of goods sold accounts look something like this: The items are used to record all job-related costs on all invoices, purchase orders, and estimates. This allows you to set up your cost codes as Items and keep your chart of accounts very simple. Actuals and the Job Profitability Detail report - are item-based. In QuickBooks Desktop, the key job costing reports - the Job Estimates vs.
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