Your suggestions for Work Orders

Hi i am a wholesaler and could you suggest me how i can increase my business for my electronic products..

Hi Alex.

My Linkedin Group (Successful QuickBooks Consultants) has about 5,000 members.  It would be a great place to post this question if you'd like to join the group.  Here's a link to join:  http://www.linkedin.com/groupR...

I am currently using Quickbooks Pro 2009.  I would like to see a tool bar button that would enable you to receive payment on a work order while you are in the creation screen.  I do realize that the work order would have to be posted as an invoice before a payment can be received on it, but the new button would also post it, while not closing the window or moving to the next invoice number.  The only way to do this now it to set general preferences to "save transaction before printing", click on the print invoice button which posts the invoice, when the print window pops up you have to cancel the print job if its not needed, then right click on invoice screen to receive payment.

Work orders would be awesome. It would need a feature to show labor, inventory and freight itemized on each repair done for that customer. In other words if you had a work order and fix three different problems it would itemize each item to show the customer what each fix cost them. Also it would be good if QB could receive inventory directly from a purchase order to the work order.

Work orders are similar to purchase orders except that the items being requested on a work order are generally labor hours.  We do HVAC service work and when a customer calls in requesting service, we create a work order for that request and then assign field personnel to the job.  When the job is complete it is matched up with the timesheet from the field worker and billed.  (along with the purchase order for any material used on the job). 

So in quickbooks it would operate the same as a purchase order, but instead of ordering inventory and non-inventory parts, you would be ordering a service item, such as pipe fitter, electrician, computer tech etc.

We are in the process of converting from an old linux system to Quickbooks and I would love to be able to track our work orders in Quickbooks more efficiently.  We may look into scheduling software as an add on to Quickbooks.

Alex -  We offer tool repair at our facility and use work orders for tool repairs.  A few suggestions to make life so much easier would be if when making a sale receipt, a box would pop up after entering in customers names that contained open work orders (or sales orders)   This is an ongoing problem in our business, because we have customers tools that sit here for a long time after they are repaired and the customer forgets, and  the employee would have to look at history of every customer  to see if they have an open work order, which slows down the sale process making for unhappy customers.

It would also be nice to be able to select mutiple open work orders and sell them all on one sales receipt.  The way it works now is you have to sell them one by one, and the only solution is to charge them all individually to their "account" and then take a payment for the total.  This is a problem when the customer does not have a house account, and a manager needs to override this feature.  Then when the transaction is complete you then have to go back in and make sure you uncheck the "use account" option for that customer or it will show that they do have an account. 

There is also no template option for a work order receipt to print out with a barcode.  I would be great to just scan the work order into the computer as well.  Also the work order numbers do not transfer over onto the sales recepit which makes for a sloppy history as well.

Debbie Chittenden

Hi Alex,

I am the Channel Sales Manager for Intuit Field Service Management ES, a work order scheduling/dispatching/mobile invoicing and payment capture system designed as a better way to manage work orders with QuickBooks Enterprise Edition.  I'll be glad to chat with you about customer experiences, feedback, etc., as well as general product direction and plans.  There are also some useful customer testimonials here: http://workplace.intuit.com/intuitfieldservicemanagementes/reviews

-Mike Simons (find me on the internal directory)