Project-based work means
that your current effort for a customer has a beginning and an end, even if it
sometimes seems like the project will last forever. Whether you build custom
software programs or apartment buildings, you can use QuickBooks’ job-tracking
features to analyze financial performance by project.
If you sell products and
don’t give a hoot about job tracking, you can simply invoice customers for the
products you sell without ever creating a job in QuickBooks. On the other hand,
suppose you want to know whether you’re making more money on the mansion you’re
building or on the bungalow remodel, and the percentage of profit you made on
each project. QuickBooks can tell you these financial measures as long as you
create jobs for each project you want to track.
In QuickBooks, jobs cling
to customers like baby possums to their mothers. A QuickBooks job always belongs to a customer. In
fact, if you try to choose the Add Job command before you create a customer,
you’ll see a message box telling you to create a customer first. Both the New
Customer dialog box and the Edit Customer dialog box include tabs for customer
info and job info. So when you
create a customer, in effect, you create one job automatically, but you can add
as many as you need.
Creating a New Job
Because jobs belong to
customers, you have to create a customer before you can create any of that
customer’s jobs. Once the customer exists, follow these steps to add a job to
the customer’s record:
1. In the Customer Center,
right-click the customer you want, and then choose Add Job from the shortcut
menu. You can also select the customer in the
Customers & Jobs tab, and then, in the Customer Center toolbar, choose New
Customer & Job➝Add Job. Either way, the
New Job dialog box appears.
2. In the Job Name box,
type a name for the job. This name will appear on
invoices and other customer documents. You can type up to 41 characters in the
box. The best names are short but easily recognizable by both you and the customer.
QuickBooks fills in most of
the remaining job fields with the information you entered for the customer
associated with this job. You can skip the fields on the Address Info,
Additional Info, and Payment Info tabs unless the information on these tabs is
different for this job. For example, if materials for the job go to a different
shipping address than the customer’s, type the address in the fields on the
Address Info tab.
3. If you want to add info
about the job type, dates, or status, click the Job Info tab and enter values
in the appropriate fields. If you add job types, you
can analyze jobs with similar characteristics, no matter which customer hired
you to do the work. Filling in the Job Status field lets you see what’s going
on by scanning the Customer Center,
If you want to see whether
you’re going to finish the work on schedule, you can document your estimated
and actual dates for the job in the Date fields
4. After you’ve filled in
the job fields, click Next to create another job for the same customer, or
click OK to save the job and close the New Job dialog box.
When you select a job in the Customer Center (jobs are indented
below their customers), the Job Information section of the window displays Job
Status, Start Date, Projected End, and End Date. If you want to edit info
you’ve entered for a job, double-click a job’s name in the left-hand list to
open the Edit Job dialog box. Job indented below customer Job
fields POWER USERS’
Modifying Customer and
Job Information
As long as you enter a
customer name when you create a new customer, it’s fine to leave all the other
customer fields blank. You can edit a customer’s record at any time to add more
data or change what’s already there. Similarly, you can create a job with only
the job name and come back later to edit it or add details.
QuickBooks gives you a few
ways to open the Edit Customer or Edit Job dialog box when the Customer Center
window is open:
• On the Customers &
Jobs tab, double-click the customer or job you want to tweak.
• Select the customer or
job you want to edit on the Customers & Jobs tab and then press Ctrl+E. •
On the Customers & Jobs tab, right-click the customer or job and then
choose Edit Customer:Job from the shortcut menu.
• After you select a
customer or job, on the right side of the Customer Center, click Edit Customer
(or Edit Job).
In the Edit Customer dialog
box, you can make changes to all the fields—except Current Balance. QuickBooks
pulls the customer’s balance from the opening balance (if you provide one) and
shows any unpaid invoices for that customer. Once a customer exists, creating
invoices is your only way of reproducing the customer’s current balance.
Similarly, all the fields
in the Edit Job dialog box are editable except for Current Balance. Remember
that the changes you make to fields on the Address Info, Additional Info,
Payment Info, and Job Info tabs apply only to that job, not to the customer.
You can’t change the
currency assigned to a customer if you’ve recorded a transaction for that
customer. So if the customer moves from Florida to France and starts using
euros, you’ll need to close that customer’s current balance (by receiving
payments for outstanding invoices). Then, you can create a new customer in
Quick- Books and assign the new currency to it. After the customer’s new record
is ready to go, you can make the old record inactive.
Warning: Unless you’ve revamped your naming standard
for customers, don’t edit the value in a customer’s Customer Name field. Why?
Because doing so can mess up things like customized reports you’ve created that
are filtered by a specific customer name. Such reports aren’t smart enough to automatically
use the new customer name. If you do modify a Customer Name field, make sure to
modify any customization to use the new name. ╉╉Categorizing Customers and Jobs
Categorizing Customers
and Jobs
If you want to report and
analyze your financial performance to see where your business comes from and
which type is most profitable, categorizing your QuickBooks customers and jobs
is the way to go. For example, customer and job types can help you produce a
report of kitchen remodel jobs that you’re working on for residential customers.
With that report, you can
order catered dinners to treat those clients to customer service they’ll brag
about to their friends. If you run a construction company, knowing that your
commercial customers cause fewer headaches and that doing work for them is more profitable than residential jobs
is a strong motivator to focus your future marketing efforts on commercial
work.
If you take the time to
plan your customers and jobs in QuickBooks in advance, you’ll save yourself
hours of effort later, when you need information about your business. You can
add customer and job types (as well as customers and jobs) anytime. If you don’t have time to
add types now, come back to this section when you’re ready to learn how. GEM IN THE ROUGH
Understanding Customer Types
Business owners often like
to look at the performance of different segments of their business. Say your
building-supply company has expanded over the years to include sales to
homeowners, and you want to know how much you sell to homeowners versus
professional contractors. In that case, you can use customer types to each
customer as a homeowner or contractor to make this comparison, and then total
sales by Customer Type. As you’ll learn soon, categorizing a customer is as
easy as choosing a customer type from the aptly named Customer Types list. Customer
types are yours to mold into whatever categories help you analyze your business.
A healthcare provider might
classify customers by their insurance, because reimbursement levels depend on
whether a patient has Medicare, major medical insurance, or pays privately. A
clothing maker might classify customers as custom, retail, or wholesale,
because the markup percentages are different for each. And a training company
could categorize customers by how they learned about the company’s services.
The “Sales by
Customer Detail” report initially totals income by customer. To subtotal income
by customer type (corporate vs. government customers, in this example), click
Modify Report. On the Display tab of the dialog box that appears, choose
“Customer type” in the “Total by” dropdown list (circled), and then click OK.
When you create your
company file using an industry-specific edition of Quick- Books or the EasyStep
Interview, QuickBooks fills in the Customer Type List with a few types of
customers that are typical for your industry. If your sense is eccentric, you can
delete QuickBooks’ suggestions and replace them with your own entries. If
you’re a landscaper, you might include customer types such as Lethal, Means
Well, and Green Thumb, so you can decide whether Astroturf, cacti, or orchids
are most appropriate.
Here are some suggestions
for using customer types and other QuickBooks features to analyze your business
in different ways:
• Customer business type. Use customer types to
classify your customers by their business sector, such as corporate,
government, and small business.
• Nonprofit “customers.” For nonprofit organizations,
customer types such as Member, Individual, Corporation, Foundation, and
Government Agency can help you target fundraising efforts.
• Location or region. Customer types or classes
can help track business performance if your company spans multiple regions,
offices, or business units.
• Services. To track how much
business you do for each service you offer, set up separate income accounts in
your Chart of Accounts.
• Products. To track product sales,
create one or more income accounts in your Chart of Accounts.
• Marketing. To identify the income
you earned based on how customers learned about your services, create classes
such as Referral, Web, Newspaper, and Blimp, or enter text in a custom field.
That way, you can create a report that shows the revenue you’ve earned from
different marketing efforts—and figure out whether each one is worth the money.
• Customer support. You may find it handy to
use classes to categorize customers by their headache factor, such as High
Maintenance, Average, and Easy To Please (as long as you’re careful to keep the
class designation off of the invoices you send out). Creating a Customer Type You can create customer types when you set up your QuickBooks
company file or at any time after setup.
Here’s how:
1. Choose Lists➝Customer & Vendor Profile Lists➝Customer Type List. The Customer Type List
window opens, displaying the existing customer types. ╉╉Categorizing Customers
and Jobs
2. To add a new type,
press Ctrl+N or, at the bottom of the Customer Type List window, click Customer
Type, and then choose New. The New Customer Type
dialog box, shown in diagram below
3. Type a name for the new
type in the Customer Type box and then click OK. If
you want, you can set up a customer type as a subtype of another type. The
diagram explains how.
4. To create another
customer type, click Next. Lather, rinse, and repeat.
When you’re done, click OK. When you close the New Customer Type dialog box,
the new types appear in the Customer Types list.
To define a customer
type as a subtype of another, turn on the “Subtype of” checkbox as shown here. Then,
in the drop-down list, choose the top-level customer type. For example, if you
sell to different levels of government, the top-level customer type could be
Government and contain subtypes Federal, State, County, and Local.
Categorizing Jobs
Jobs are optional in
QuickBooks, so job types matter only if you track your work by job. So if your
sole source of income is selling organic chicken fat ripple ice cream to health-obsessed
carnivores, jobs and job types don’t matter—your relationship with your
customers is one long run of selling and delivering products.
But for project based businesses, job types
add another level of filtering to the reports you produce. If you’re a writer,
then you can use job types to track the kinds of documents you produce (Manual,
White Paper, and Marketing Propaganda, for instance) and filter the Job Profitability
Report by job type to see which forms of writing are the most lucrative.
Creating a job type is similar to creating a
customer type (described in the previous section): Choose Lists➝Customer & Vendor Profile Lists➝Job Type List. When the Job Type List window opens, press Ctrl+N
to open the New Job Type window, and then enter a name for the job type. If you
want to create a subtype, turn on the “Subtype of ” checkbox and choose the job
type this subtype belongs to. •‰â•‰Adding Notes About Customers
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