How Contractors Can Get Help With Job Costing and Project Costing In QuickBooks Accounting?
Job costing in Quickbooks and project costing In QuickBooks, when we are accounting for contractors, the first thing we want to do is understand your profit margins and how you are spending money.
However, it is even more important for our big projects to know how you performed specifically on that project, and luckily QuickBooks Online makes that easy!
First and foremost, let us go over some parameters. Working with all the pros the contractors that we do, I have found that there is a point where you might be overdoing the project costing. In a highly service-driven business with small service calls for several hundred dollars to a thousand dollars, project costing won’t make sense. The amount of time you will have to put into it to cost every job will never pay off. As such, I recommend all of my clients not cost any job for $1,500 or less, anything over that though we want as much detail as we can.
Set up a project in QuickBooks Online
Once we determine if you need to do job Costing or Project costing on the job, we need to set up the project in QuickBooks. Typically with contractors, we consider it Job Costing in QuickBooks calls them Projects. In setting up a project, we must first make sure there is a customer for that project set up in QuickBooks. From there, we can add a new project from the projects page. This is very important as, unlike customers, you can only start a new project from the Projects page, not directly from an invoice.
- Keep in mind that QBO is designed for multiple types of businesses, so they use overarching terms and verbiage that will not always apply to you.
Associate the labor
In order for projects to flow smoothly, we need to make sure one more thing is in place. Your job costing is heavily influenced by labor costs. Which is not just the hours they work but their taxes, benefits, and overhead costs. In the project window, click Hourly costs to see how much it costs to employ each employee each hour.From there, you will enter a weekly timesheet for each employee and what project they worked on when and it will automatically add all of those costs to the project for tracking.
- If you aren’t using QuickBooks for your payroll. In that case, QuickBooks has no clue on how to calculate this information; luckily, they built a handy tool for us to simplify the process.
- If you run payroll through QuickBooks, already make sure you are entering your weekly payroll with time assigned to a project. It will figure out those calculations automatically for you. To walk through and see how to set up these calculations or exactly how to track the time, watch the below video.
Send invoicing to the project
With the setup complete now, we need to make sure that we are using that project while working in QuickBooks with our invoicing and expenses. We can treat a project just like a customer. When we send an invoice instead of sending it to the customer, we send it to the project. It will still email and have all the customer details as if you sent it to the customer. When doing expenses, we make sure to assign the project to each cost associated with them.
Now to do this, you may need to turn on a few settings in QuickBooks, but you will only need to do this once, and then you can treat a project just like a customer. In the two videos below, we walk you through setting up and using projects in your invoicing and expenses with examples to get you started.
The best part is in the reporting!
After all that now your job is in progress or complete; now you get to use the best part of projects, the reporting! There are no time limits on Projects in QuickBooks. You can have a job go on for three months or even a year. It will always show up with everything until you close the project out. At the same time, it gives you a nice graph to watch your income versus expenses. You’ll see your final profit margin when everything’s said and done.
Better yet, they have specific reports that you can look at to see a profit and loss for that project along with the time spent on the job so that you can break that job down and figure out what went wrong and what went great.
This is one of the best features that QuickBooks has released for contractors in a long time and makes QuickBooks Online better than ever before because it provides so much information. However, QuickBooks is designed for the masses in many different industries. It is not the end all be all with everything that you need as a contractor, but it is a great place to start.
However, if you are a general contractor or your primary business revolves around job costing, I recommend an even better program, which we will hit on later. In the meantime, if you have any questions or would like some more guidance on project costing through QuickBooks Online, don’t hesitate to reach out to us!
Ready to find out more?
Drop us a line today for a free quote!
