Whether building a big shopping center or a new home, construction work isn’t just about having the right physical tools anymore. By using the best accounting software for your company, your staff can work smarter, not harder. Let QuickBooks Contractor Edition help you tackle your finances.
QuickBooks Contractor Edition helps you juggle bids, estimates, customers, vendors, and employees for seamless construction accounting. It has all the functionality of QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions with construction-industry-specific reports and features.
What Are The Benefits Of Using QuickBooks?
It's an end-to-end construction accounting software that can grow with your company. You'll have all the accounting tools to organize your finances, manage inventory, track sales, and execute payroll functions. QuickBooks Contractor helps you manage costs throughout each project and track your bottom line.
Customizable Reports Stay apprised of job costs and your cash flow to ensure you stay profitable throughout a project. Advanced Reporting lets you locate the right report fast. Reports are bundled for the construction industry, so you can save time by using templates to auto-fill with your company's information. QuickBooks Contractor also has a robust Help Portal when you have questions.
Job Costing Reports
As you pay bills, your employees and subs, you can see how your company is doing along the way with special construction reports, such as:
- Job Costs by Job
- Job Status
- Cost-to-Complete
- Unpaid Bills for each Job
- Expenses Not Assigned to Jobs
- Billed/Unbilled Hours by Person and Job
- Open Purchase Orders by Vendor
Benefit from accurate job costing estimates. Unless you can accurately record job costs, you can end up quoting the wrong price. Use QuickBooks from the initial estimate on a job to the final quote.
Need To Manage Large Amounts of Data? Contractor can handle large data files, so you can work with two company files at the same time.
User Capacity You can have between 1 and 30 users working on QuickBooks Contractor at the same time. If you use their hosting service, users can access files from anywhere at any time. This makes working in the field with QuickBooks easy, and your employees can stay connected wherever they are.
What Other Features Are Included In QuickBooks For Contractors?
Data Conversion: You can convert your data from most any other accounting solution such as Sage/Peachtree, Timberlane, Oracle, Master Builder, Xero, NetSuite, Intacct, AccPac and more.
Job Costing For Contractors: From one view you can get all the information you need on a job such as your profitability, percentage complete, unpaid invoices and realized costs.
Cost To Complete: You can quickly view the cost to complete a job which is essential for any contractor. And you can see unpaid bills by job to get a handle on your finances. With QuickBooks Contractor Edition you can send out invoice reminders to get paid fast.
Estimating: You can view estimates versus actuals, and you convert your estimates into billing-by-service items, percent complete or dollars.
Change Orders: These are easy to make, and you can track and highlight changes to estimates and view all change orders by each job.
Specific Features For The Construction Industry Include:
- E-Invoicing
- Industry-Specific Report Bundles
- Payments Search Screen
- Disallow Negative Inventory Quantities
- Total Columns on Purchases and Sales
- A Job Costing Center and Advanced Job Costing Tools
- Change Order Features
- Flexible Billing Rates
- Customize Your Chart of Accounts
- Scheduling
- Work Orders
- Estimating
How Do We Get Started With QuickBooks Contractor Edition?
QuickBooks experts agree that it's easy to use, but not so easy to set up properly. Setting up QuickBooks correctly, in the beginning, will save you a lot of problems later. If it's not set up and used properly, your accounting won't be accurate.
Most contractors don't realize this. Keep in mind that QuickBooks Contractor is designed to meet the needs of every type of contractor – from a handyman to the bridge builder. So, you must customize it to your unique requirements.
These are some common mistakes that contractors make when setting up QuickBooks. Make sure you do these things:
- Input payments correctly
- Don't make a new file for each project.
- Apply Vendor Credits to Bills correctly.
- Don't outsource payroll.
- Set up a unique Chart of Accounts and Items List according to your needs.
- Don't enter job costs using the Expenses and/or Accounts Tab.
- Set up Items to track both Income and Expenses.
- Use the built-in Estimate function or use an estimating program that integrates with QuickBooks Contractor Edition.
- Reconcile your Bank and Credit Card accounts.
- Use the "Ask My Accountant Chart of Accounts" feature for expenses that are difficult to categorize.
The first thing to do is to ask your IT service provider to help you set up QuickBooks. They know your business and can help with the setup. Once this is done, you will be able to take over from there.
As a trusted IT consultant for construction companies in Dallas/Ft. Worth, we can help you set up QuickBooks Contractor Edition. The team at Data Magic Computer Services is here to answer any questions you may have.
