Service Firms and QuickBooks (especially Firms offering technical or project-oriented services who want to track job profitability such as engineering, architects, technical support, marketing, design, etc. )

Service firms offering technical or project-oriented services bear a remarkable number of similarities to trade contractors and/or custom builder construction companies. I.e., in both cases:

A customer wants a specific product and/or set of standardized (or customized) actions to take place.
A complex series of job stages or actions must take place to produce the final product.
Employees are assigned to, work on, and may incur additional expenses related to the job.
Certain materials may need to be ordered and/or sub-contractors hired to create the finished service and/or product.
If company owners want to know the profitability on the job, income and all related costs (including labor costs) must be recorded and attached to that job.

Another similarity exists between construction and technical/project-oriented service firms in that, in certain cases, the cost of the job does not move into the income statement until the job is complete and sold/transferred to the end purchaser.

Because of the unique service-oriented nature of the services you perform and the risk related to labor over-runs you are constantly at risk for time and cost over-runs and thin gross profit margins.

To balance those risks, you need accurate job-cost information so that you can:

Track progress on jobs and monitor financial results.
Keep an eye on changes that impact your profit margins.
Be in a position to make informed decisions as jobs progress.

Additionally you may need to develop a system that can help you:

Create job estimates
Enter incoming service orders
Assist with purchasing

The most important benefit of accurate job-cost and overall company financial and profitability information is the ability to shape your own financial future. How?

When you are intimately familiar with your job-cost and company’s financial numbers, you’ll be able to create more accurate estimates and make smarter buying and pricing decisions.

That’s the real way you can truly make a permanent and lasting change in your bottom line!

At a minimum, you will probably want to use your accounting system to:

Assign sub-contracted, and materials costs to jobs.
Assign payroll and payroll tax cost for direct labor employees to individual jobs or products
Track Estimate vs. Actual results (by job stage) for nearly all of their jobs.
Perform a variety of basic accounting functions within an integrated accounting system (e.g., Accounts Payable, Credit Card Entry, Write and Print Checks, Invoicing, monitor Accounts Receivable, 1099s, Basic Estimates, etc.).
Create a variety of financial reports that will provide information to help run your business more profitably.

You may wish to utilize more advanced features such as:

Sales Orders (Work Orders)
Purchase Orders.
Budgeting.
Payroll preparation and related tax filings.
Fixed assets tracking.
Customizing and printing Forms.
Using QuickBooks® to assign fully burdened labor cost to jobs.

Additionally, you are probably looking for a system that:

Can be customized to match the specific way that they do business.
Can be managed in-house by trained accounting staff.
Is reasonably priced, with minimal maintenance fees.

Fortunately, QuickBooks® and/or QuickBooks® Enterprise is an ideal match for most technical/project-oriented service companies IF Lists are properly structured and IF bookkeeping staff is trained in various specific aspects of a technical/project-oriented service company’s accounting and reporting.

Lack of knowledge regarding these crucial accounting and business topics causes numerous errors and frustration, and can cost a business literally hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenues and excess cost. But we can help you address a majority of the typical concerns faced by technical and/or project-oriented service companies through focused training and, if necessary, by providing additional assistance from qualified accountants and Certified QuickBooks Pro Advisors.

With our training services we can provide you with essential basics as well as advanced QuickBooks® applications knowledge. We bring thousands of hours of hands-on QuickBooks®, job-cost, and technical/project-oriented service company accounting experience to the table in these subjects.

We will help you discover how to build your QuickBooks® system to provide you with the information that you need to make more informed, and more profitable, operating, estimating, and pricing decisions for your technical/project-oriented service company.

We offer one-to-one support and consulting services to clients throughout North America, and industry-specific QuickBooks online training seminars as well.

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