QuickBooks for Contractors

[Bean Guy]

My moniker is "Bean Guy" because I've been doing accounting work all my life.
We do a lot of work for construction companies, and put a book together called "QuickBooks for Contractors". Its for sale at Amazon and other sites. If you need help I can honestly say I wrote the book on it.

 

[Stoveman]

I've got a love/hate relationship with QuickBooks. I would love for something else to come along because I hate QB.



Cool that you got published, though, congrats.

 

[Bean Guy]

What drives you nuts?

 

[davsco]

man, qb is the bomb! super easy and intuitive. at two different companies we actually "downgraded" from unnecessarily complex systems to QB.

 

[rgramjet]

I loved quickbooks 2007.
The online subscription service sucks.
I loves me some simplicity!

 

[ROBAR35]

I've been using QB for contractors for about 15 years now and I'm with Stoveman,mostly love but some hate for the software.Maybe It's just the way I do it but job tracking is not exactly user friendly. I will look into buying your book though.

 

[Bean Guy]

It all depends on what you are trying to do. Job costing makes sense if you have longer term jobs.If thats the the case it can be set up to compare your estimated costs to actual which will tell you if you are under or over estimating in certain areas. My first client was a GC and he was anal about knowing how each part of a job did against the estimate. He's done well with that mindset.

If you have a lot of small jobs that are over quick, job costing is not worth it.

 

[Stoveman]

What drives you nuts?

Not in order:

1. Their email system doesn't play well in the sandbox. I have several clients who cannot receive emailed invoices directly from QB. I have to print to PDF and send them via regular email.
2. The bull crap updates. This is accounting, the fact that you have changed your look and can now give me a report on time spent in the bathroom by employees is not ground breaking. I'd rather pay a yearly fee and be done with it, don't yank my chain.
3. QB cloud back up doesn't work. Period. I would love to be able to charge them for my time spent trying to make this work.
4. Payroll doesn't always correspond to the correct week. I do payroll every week and at least half the time have to manually input the correct dates.
5. When paying bills if I enter two bills from Home Depot, for example, it will lump them together to pay as one sum instead of individual bills on separate dates.
6. Just as I'm ready to do payroll a new update pops up. Right, I'm ready to spend an hour doing payroll and I want to wait for new updates to download. Send me the update some other time.

Quickbooks sucks balls.....

 

[Bean Guy]

Can't say I like the annoying built in adds. But I can tell you that the drill down functionality is better that some $20,000 specialty packages I've seen.

We have a young gal in the office who does payroll for numerous clients, let me see what her advice is on the payroll dates.

 

[Stoveman]

I don't get any adds, except when it's time to "update" or I won't be able to do payroll. I get paying for the payroll service, although they bend you over on the price, but I don't care if there is a new feature to be able to track employee smoke breaks.


Quickbooks is a near monopoly and they act like it.


And the joy that is their customer support. "Hallo, pleased to be speeking to yoo, my name is Daveed." No, it's not, Rajesh, just stop it.....

 

[davsco]

6. Just as I'm ready to do payroll a new update pops up.

should be able to turn off automatic updates

 

[Stoveman]

should be able to turn off automatic updates

Perhaps.


What if just as you put your truck in drive that a message pops up on your dashboard stating that the powertrain needs to be updated?

Or you're about to let off a shot and the safety engages?



Annoying as all get out. If the payroll updates are important, and sometimes they are, then pop that up when QB receives the update, don't wait until I'm about to do payroll to let me know that I need to hang out for 10 mins while the computer does it's thing.

 

[DadOSix]

There is always sage/peachtree software. I had a choice when we started. My then accountant said no preference, although he had quickbooks experts on staff. Bs! I tolerate qb after 8 years because it is too difficult to switch now. The peachtree manual gave me ideas how to structure things so qb would understand me. Agreed on the payroll module. It gives me the most problems with updates and locking me out with file errors but it is still less expensive that paying what the accountant wants to do it.

 

[ToolAA]

I've got a love/hate relationship with QuickBooks. I would love for something else to come along because I hate QB.



Cool that you got published, though, congrats.

I'm curious What don't you like about it? What version do you use?

I came from another company where we spent $150k on software that fit our business like a glove. That worked great until our needs changed (slightly). We soon found out how the software platform soon causes you to make dumb business decisions simply because it cant do something the way you want. We ended up spending thousands each month to have techs constantly "tweaking" crap.

For 12yrs now I've been using quickbooks for our small business. It is a very good accounting software.

We use QB enterprise and it's pretty flexible. Inventory management is just OK. Payroll is actually a good service. We canceled their credit card processing because we got a cheaper rate, but the ease of using QB for CC processing was lost, so I'm not sure we really saved anything and I'll go back to QB when our agreement is up.

 

[ROBAR35]

It all depends on what you are trying to do. Job costing makes sense if you have longer term jobs.If thats the the case it can be set up to compare your estimated costs to actual which will tell you if you are under or over estimating in certain areas. My first client was a GC and he was anal about knowing how each part of a job did against the estimate. He's done well with that mindset.

If you have a lot of small jobs that are over quick, job costing is not worth it.

I have started creating estimates based off our bids once the contract is awarded and that's fine but most of our projects are spread over several months with change orders, T&M work and retainage with progressive billings. Food for thought quicken should consider an AIA style template invoice that that will track these items I mentioned since most commercial contractors are using that format.

 

[ROBAR35]

By the way I ordered your book. Should arrive tomorrow

 

[Bean Guy]

Many thanks, feel free to contact me if you need help. AIA billing is not something QB does. I had a client that used a separate program for AIA billing, then just entered the totals in QB. I have a large client that uses a construction package called Foundation and it does a great job with AIA billing, but it costs $$$$.

 

[Stoveman]

I'm curious What don't you like about it? What version do you use?

Uh, post #8 spells out what I don't like pretty well.


I'm using QB "Pro". If their "Professional" version is a complete turd, I can't imagine what the JV model is like.

 

[Alphabrew]

I worked in public accounting from 2000-2005 out of college and back then QB was absolutely awesome. I recently looked into using it for my personal finances because I wanted a double entry system and everyone on the internet thinks that QB sucks now. I was pretty surprised because I loved it back in the day. I may check out your books just for craps and giggles. Very cool, great job OP!

 

[Bean Guy]

A few thoughts in regards to comments:

- Updates - QB sends updates for program fixes and of course changes to payroll tax tables. Since you can't do "scheduled" updates, meaning that you can't set it so that the updates will download and get installed when you are away from the machine, all I can suggest is that you do it at the end of the day, set it to run and walk away.

- Which version to use - I tell my clients to get the Premier Accountants version, its a few bucks more but has more functionality. I recommend the Premier version over the Pro version as it too has more functionality. For example in the Pro version you can only see the most recent bank reconciliation, in the Premier version you can see all that have been created. And I never recommend QuickBooks Online as I don't think it is ready for prime time. I don't know any CPA that is a fan of QuickBooks Online. If you want QuickBooks in the cloud, RightNetworks will host the various desktop versions(Pro, Premier, Enterprise) and their customer service is great. We use Rightnetworks and recommend it to our clients.

- Reports - QuickBooks reports can be modified and filtered, the titles changed, saved(memorized) for later use. The custom summary report option allows you to "flip" the traditional P&L on its side.

- Use by bookkeepers - one thing to realize is that QB is used by 95% of businesses that do under $20 million a year. That means the talent pool of bookkeepers is probably familiar with QB, likely not with other products.

- add ins - there are a lot of add in products for things like tracking employee time that will feed QB, many are well done.

We've got another book coming out soon called "QuickBooks for Accounting Professionals", I just sent it to my book editor lady.