Tracking expenses for job costing. Should I use items, chart of accounts or both?

US QuickBooks Premier

I work for a construction company. My boss wants to track the phases of the job for profit and loss. He wants this done mostly based on Trades, ie. foundation work, framing, sheet rock, etc. He also wants to track between subcontractor costs vs. in house, time and materials cost.

Can this be done strictly through the Items list, through the Chart of Accounts, or a combination of the two? I inherited a messed up file, the numbers are right, now, but I am trying to figure out how to get it to the point where the reports "look" the way that he wants.

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4 Replies

qbteachmt

Allstar, Accountant Community AllStar

03/08/11 9:50am PST

Best Answer - Chosen by the Community

Items control the flow of data to the Chart of Accounts.

Item-based reports are more powerful than strictly financial reports, for job tracking.

Items have to be used on the Purchase transactions (payments to suppliers of goods and services) as well as sales to customers, and on timesheets, for good reporting.

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marktheophilus

Contributor

03/08/11 10:17am PST

Currently, both the Item List, and the Chart of Accounts are large and detailed. I am concerned that there is overkill in this. For example, there is an item for plumbing:materials, and it links to COGS:Materials:Plumbing supplies. It is the same with the plumbing labor, linking to Subcontractor Expense:Reconstruction:Plumbing.

This seems like a lot of overkill, but I want to be sure before I start merging or deleting accounts.

Part of the file has been done using the expense tab on transactions, rather than the Item tab. I think that may be why the Chart of Accounts is so long.

I can go back and re-classify things on the open jobs if I need to, but especially want things to track correctly from this point.

So, if the Item List is set up correctly, can the Chart of Accounts be streamlined, and I will still be able to track P&L by the trades of the job?

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johnstde

Contributor

03/08/11 10:36am PST

We use the "Class" table to follow phases. QB is used for our construction department as well, and different items on one PO could be fore different phases, so we add Class as a custom field in the PO line item table.

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marktheophilus

Contributor

03/08/11 10:44am PST