The Barefoot Accountant on Accounting, QuickBooks, Taxes, Money, and Politics

QuickBooks Contractor Edition has been highly publicized as the ideal affordable software package for small contractors.  And it does offer a job costing feature; however, producing standard job costing reports is no easy manner in QuickBooks, particularly when one desires to produce Work-in-Progress and Completed-Contracts schedules.

For instance, I cannot fathom why QuickBooks failed to allow the user to filter job costing, profit and loss by jobs, and job summary reports by job status, even though there is a field for status entry under “Jobs” in the “Additional Info” tab.  Under the caption “Job Status”, the user is provided with the following designations:

1. None
2. Pending
3. Awarded
4. In progress
5. Closed
6. Not awarded

I would have preferred QuickBooks to classify jobs in the following conventional categories of job status:

1. Pending
2. In progress
3. Completed
4. Closed

And then to allow the user in QuickBooks to filter job progress and profitability reports by these criteria.  If such had been provided by QuickBooks, it would be a snap to produce Work-in-Progress and Completed-Contracts reports on demand, instead of spending considerable time determining which jobs are in progress and which are complete, and then modify each profit and loss by jobs report by being required to select each incomplete or complete job, respectively, under “Modify Report” each time a profit and loss by jobs report is to be generated.  If there existed such a link between job status and job costing reports in the QuickBooks Contractor Editor, Intuit would have hit a home run with contractors.  However, there is no such link between Job Status and the reporting module in QuickBooks, even though job status is found as a filter item in the report modification list.

I have posted questions on the Intuit Community website regarding the inability to produce such reports by modifying the reports by job status; however, never have I received any reply addressing that deficiency in QuickBooks.  Perhaps QuickBooks management should sometimes read the posts in their Question and Answer feature on their website instead of sending out needless surveys asking how they can improve QuickBooks.

This article is provided for informational purposes and is not intended to be construed as legal, accounting, or other professional advice.  For further information, please consult appropriate professional advice from your attorney and certified public accountant. 

Have a tax or an accounting question?  Please feel free to submit it to William Brighenti, Certified Public Accountant, Hartford CPA Accountants.  For information and assistance on any tax and accounting issue, please visit our website:  Accountants CPA Hartford.

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