Quickbooks

[byhammerandhand]

Have any of you used Quickbooks to accumulate billable hours and expenses on a project-by-project basis?   For example, you are doing a large commercial job on a time and materials basis and you need to accumulate both as billable to a customer.

My son-in-law is starting a consulting / contracting business and needs to track and bill time as he does work.  It will be billed monthly or at the end of a project.

When I looked around, it appeared you could track expenses, mileage, and time to a customer and have it show up on a Statement (as opposed to an Invoice or Sales Receipt).

[Virgs Sew n Sew]

That should not be a problem to do at all.  I worked for a woman when we first moved back to Nebraska.  Her son started a fire sprinkler installation business and Carmen quit working where I worked at to do her son's books.  She told me that Chris was using QuickBooks and that it was very simple to use.  Chris had worked for the same fire sprinkler installation company that I worked for (last job) and we tracked billable hours, materials, etc.  I would bet dollars to donuts that his billing method is almost identical to what we did where I was billing out jobs.  As an installer, Chris had been trained to track his hours, materials, mileage, etc to bill to the appropriate job so it would have been very easy for him to set up books to bill out using the same methodology.  I know that QuickBooks is very flexible and also very easy to learn according to Carmen.

Virginia

[MinUph]

I've use QB since it's inception many years now. I have not used it to keep T&M. Maybe it would do the job but I can't say I have used it for that. What I did use was a spreadsheet I built to track time and materials on a daily basis. I input a start time, end time and any supplies I bought and the SS kept tract of it all. I then billed my customer on a weekly basis with an invoice and added their payment to the spreadsheet and it deducted that from their balance. I would be happy to share this if you want to see it. It would need to be modified for your hourly wage. It also did more than one man per day. It took me a long time to build this so it was solid.

[gene]

Have any of you used Quickbooks to accumulate billable hours and expenses on a project-by-project basis?

No I haven't myself.

However, one of the big features of QB is to invoice using "time and expenses". QB is a favorite of anyone who bills on a time and materials basis.

You can set the company preferences to "time and expenses" and that option will come up when you click on Invoice.

Paul, if you get a few hours to look into how QB does this it may save you some time in the long run. All your data would already be in QB and no need to transfer anything back and forth to the spreadsheet.

gene