Using Customer Jobs in QuickBooks

Posted by Dave Dunn on April 24, 2008 | 0 Comments

Tags: QuickBooks, Small Business

If you do project-based work for your customers, then you will probably want to use customer jobs. Using job tracking allows you to analyze your financial performance by job and job type. You can easily figure out both how much money you made on a specific job and how much money you make on certain types of jobs. Customer jobs in QuickBooks are connected to customers. Therefore, you have to have a customer before you can have a customer job. However, you can have as many jobs as you want for each customer. Here are some reasons to have jobs:

• Customer has multiple offices or branches for which you perform services
  When you have a customer with multiple locations and billing centers, then you can use customer jobs in QuickBooks to separately record the information for each location. While you could simply create multiple customers, using customer jobs enables you to easily analyze your profitability on work done for the parent company as a whole as well as for each job.
• You perform multiple services for one customer
  When you perform multiple services for one customer, you can use customer jobs to analyze your profitability on each service. For example, a contractor could analyze his or her profitability on replacing a roof and redesigning a kitchen for the same customer by creating two jobs, roof and kitchen, under one customer, and then assigning the revenue and expenses associated with each actual job to the customer job in QuickBooks.
• You perform different types of work and want to know how profitable you are for each one
  You can use Job Types to break your business down into different categories and then analyze your profitability by category.
• Using Customer Jobs enables you to track additional information about the individual projects you do for customers
  You can record the Start Date, Projected End Date, and actual End Date for each job on the Job Info tab. You can set Price Levels on the Additional Info tab and can even add fields (click on Define Fields in the Additional Info tab) to track additional information about each job.

While not for every business, customer jobs are very useful for companies that do multiple jobs for the same customer and for customers that want to track their profitability for different categories of work.