If your business is project-based, it can be hard to know exactly how much profit vs. expenses you make with each job. There may be times when expenses are purchased for several jobs at once or used over several projects. Clients have multiple invoices with incomplete payments, but you have a hard time keeping track of this for each project. This makes it difficult to decide where to focus your marketing on because you can’t be certain what services are the most profitable to your business.
What if I told you there was a way to both track your expenses for each project and make sure your clients don’t miss making payments?
It’s called job costing and can be a profound way for you to both organize your business and plan for its growth. Job costing is tracking both your expenses and income for each project that you take on, from start to finish.
While this is feasible with Excel or Google sheets (?), there is an option available to you on QuickBooks Online, making the whole process streamlined and all in one place. If you look on the right hand side while inside your Quickbooks Online account (if you have a Plus or Advanced subscription), you can find a tab simply called Projects. This is your hub for everything job-costing related.
You can get started with an estimate, marking it as in progress, accepted, or refused. Once the job has been started, you are able to send the client invoices, put in any expenses related to the job, track employee time, and see reports specific for the job.
Being that all of this is in one place makes the Projects a relief to all kinds of HVAC professionals, plumbers, painters, and other contractors who might have several jobs going at once and need a place to track information on each project.
How can a bookkeeper help with this?
Since job-costing can be time-consuming and easily messed up, a bookkeeper can help with keeping things organized and on track without you having to put in much effort. It is important to make sure that you and your bookkeeper are working together in this, since you will be needing to get them the receipts/information on the project to make sure that all data is correct. The bookkeeper will then be able to put this into Projects and provide you with a report at the end of the job. Using this data, you can make better decisions as far as marketing and choosing the right niche for your company.
Here is some more information on why you should outsource your bookkeeping if you are a contractor or tradesman.
Have you been wanting to do job-costing for your trades business but aren’t sure how to get started? Let me know in the comments!
