 QuickBooks Online 2024, jobs, subcustomers and projects. Get ready and some coffee because we're getting the business on target with QuickBooks Online 2024. Here we are in our Get Great Guitars 2024 QuickBooks Online sample company file we set up in a prior presentation opening up the major financial statement reports like we do every time the reports on the left hand side within the favorites were right-clicking on that balance sheet to open link in new tab right-clicking on the profit and loss to open link in new tab right-clicking on the trial balance to open a link in a new tab let's go to that tab to the right close up the hamburger and change that range we're going from 010124 tab 013124 tab we will run it to refresh it tab into the middle repeating the process closing the hamburger changing the range 010124 tab 013124 tab once again refreshing the report tab into the right it's like an assembly line process here once again closing the hamburger and changing the range 010124 tab 013124 tab and we will run it first a word from our sponsor yeah actually we're sponsoring ourselves on this one because apparently the merchandisers they don't want to be seen with us but but that's okay whatever because our merchandise is is better than their stupid stuff anyways like our crunchy numbers is my cardio product line now i'm not saying that subscribing to this channel crunching numbers with us will make you thin fit and healthy or anything however it does seem like it worked for her just saying so yeah subscribe hit the bell thing and buy some merchandise so you can make the world a better place by sharing your accounting instruction exercise routine if you would like a commercial free experience consider subscribing to our website at accounting instruction dot com or accounting instruction dot thinkific dot com to refresh it let's go back to the first tab this time we're going to be taking a look at the concept of uh sub customers or jobs we can also look at the projects now i'm going to give a little bit of history about these items because uh they sometimes serve a similar purpose although they have difference in their usage and you might be able to use multiple of these items together or it could be possible that newer features have taken over the older features so usually these are types of things that will be used when you have a job cost type of system when you have a job cost type of system you typically want to be tracking things by the project that you're on a typical job cost system would be like a construction company type of thing so if you have a construction company and you're dealing with accounts receivable is usually the balance sheet account we deal with with customers we might have a particular customer but instead of doing like a short job and then simply billing them when it's done we have a longer type of job and we have then the necessity to be tracking the information that's going to be assigned to that job and so on and so forth now note this can also be something that's common in service businesses as well so even if like if you're a bookkeeper or if you look work at an accounting a cpa firm or a law firm they have similar types of things because for example a law firm you can imagine they take on a project and it could be a project that they don't know how long it's going to take and the legal system being what it is it could be a long project and so you want to be tracking you know the costs of a particular project possibly not simply by client but by project if you have certain clients you can imagine certain big name legal issues these days they probably have multiple cases that are happening for one particular client at any given time possibly if you've got a big name kind of client so we need to track not only by client but by job so let's let's go back to the first tab now the places where these are located is we have our customers we recall under the sales tab or what I would call like the customer center and here are our customers so we've got our customers here now we could create what QuickBooks Online calls sub customers which would mean that we're which would mean that we have a customer that's linked to or would be subordinate to this customer and will show how to do that shortly noting that this sub customer thing was basically pulled over from the old version what used to be used as well on the desktop version where they used to call them jobs so notice that when we talk about accounting terminology we might use these terms a little bit differently because because when you're talking about jobs from a job cost a system like a percentage of completion system or something like that then you're probably going to just use the general term jobs but if when you get into the QuickBooks world then it gets a little bit more defined again because they used to be called jobs when they were in the desktop version when they moved into the online version now they call them sub customers so although we'll be using a job cost system when we're typically considering the use of sub customers or projects we don't really use the term job anymore for the actual location of the item because we would call them sub customers if we used that method or we can use the new tool which oftentimes will take over a lot of the functionality that might have been done before with the sub customers which are the projects so if projects are something that you need to be working on if you have a job cost system then that might be one reason that you need to kind of level up your account you might not be able to go too far below kind of the standard account this is not in the advanced QuickBooks online but you might need the QuickBooks online plus so the standard version in order to get access to the projects so the projects are similar to the sub customer but it's the newer and most latest type of thing which has a little bit more capacity to track things individually by the jobs because it has their own little home over here however the projects can be tied to the customers so we still think of the projects as in essence being linked to the customers so they're kind of like a more powerful possibly version of what used to be the jobs which are now called the sub customers however you can also use these two things together so you might say well if I have the projects I would not use the jobs anymore that might not be the case because for example you might have one client that has multiple sub jobs and you might want like different billing addresses for the different jobs possibly so in that case you might still create a sub customer which would be like the old job thing and then you can assign a project to the sub customer which would still be linked to the ultimate customer but have like a different billing address so that's how you might layer these things so the general rule would be well on the sales tab if you're thinking about a job cost type of system then you're probably if you have the latest version of QuickBooks Online you're probably thinking to use the projects because it's the latest and greatest thing possibly in conjunction with the jobs if you need to change like the billing address which is now called sub customers and if you have the older version of or a lower version or tiered version of QuickBooks Online you don't want to pay for the upper version because you think you can do fine with just sub customers then you can use just the sub customer functionality here and you won't have access to the projects and you can run similar types of reports like we used to do with the old job functionality now we we're not going to go into a lot of detail in a job cost system here because that's a whole nother kind of specialty in and of itself we'll just give some ideas of it we have a whole nother course or section that talks about the differences between sub customers jobs and and the projects and we've got courses on a job cost system and the reports typically run related to that noting that a job cost system has its own issues if you have extended jobs possibly having differences in revenue recognition principles because usually you recognize revenue at the end of the job but if you're if you have a long job then it might be justifiable to use like a percentage of completion method that's a specialty field in and of itself if you are a bookkeeper you want to keep that in mind you want to think what industries do I want to be in do I want it's nice to specialize in a job cost system because it's difficult there's challenges to that and and if you a lot of other people can't do that but so the question is do you want to take possibly some more difficult job jobs up and specialize in there that area and build more for them or possibly do you want to specialize elsewhere and not take on the job cost systems possibly trying to take on more clients and automate them be a specialist in that way and and then automate your clients as best you can and work that way depends on what your business model is all right so let's first set up a sub-customer so I'm going to I'm going to pretend we're going to set up a sub-customer for the Jones guitars here so I'm going to go back to the customers and do it do it up top so I'm going to say it's a new customer and we're just going to say this is I'm just going to give it a number for the job I'm going to say it's a job it's going to be a 3005 for the sub-customer that's going to be the display name so this setup is exactly the same as we had for just a normal customer but then I'm going to go down here and say it's going to be a sub-customer so now it's going to be a sub-customer I need then a parent customer and I'm going to say the parent is going to be Jones guitars so here we have that component where it says bill parent customer so you can imagine in a law firm situation you've got a high profile person and you've got there they're getting in trouble all the time and you've got multiple jobs maybe for that one person right so then so so then you might then have different billing addresses as well or you might bill that one person for the multiple jobs that we're going to set up by number here okay that'd be the idea so bill parent customer and and I won't go into that let's go in so there it is let's go ahead and say save it and boom and so it went into it here so we're now in it it looks basically like a normal customer but now we're tracking in the sub-customer if I go back to the customers noting that everything's kind of internal I don't have to use the back tab up here it's kind of in the the quick books system so if you find yourself going up here all the time to go back might work but you probably it probably be more efficient if you use the internal functionality all right any case we see the 3005 is now appearing down down here so when Jones guitars getting into you know what if it was a legal company and they're getting into trouble in a job cost system I can then build the information to whatever particular problem that they're that they're currently in breaking it out by by job let's do another one let's let's make let's make up one for Sam the guitar man we're going to hit the hit the new customer I'm just going to call the job 4002 and then scroll down and say it's going to be a sub-customer and the parent customer is going to be Sam the guitar man uh what happened Sam the guitar k in the world posso my spanish spanish english k in the world posso k posso k in the world posso a key our order let's save it sorry I've been practicing I don't get to practice so I have to do it while I work on the job we're going to go back to the customers here and then if I scroll down so now we have of course the sub-customer for Sam the guitar man now something to note here I just want to point out that QuickBooks is is trying to pull a lot of a small to mid-sized businesses from desktop it looks like to me to online and and then just have the desktop version for the advanced users that are paying the enterprise version of the desktop so it might be the case that more people are moving online something you got to be careful of then is that when you're looking at the at the jobs if you have a job system it looks like this it's going to roll in as sub-customers generally is the general idea but if you're moving from desktop to online then it might be the case that you want to move from the sub-customers to the to the projects because that would be that that might be like a level up or a reason to to move into the online system you might think that the projects is going to be a better tool to use so you could have some conversions possibly between the sub-customers and the jobs so you want to make sure you do some research on that conversion so that you do it as efficiently as possible don't just think that you're going to pull them in and then be able to use the projects if you have open jobs because you're going to want to make sure that you pull the jobs in to the the projects so you'll note up top here it said we have this little item says do you organize sub-customers as projects you can convert the first level of sub-customers into their own projects so we're not talking sub-customers of sub-customers the first level of sub-customers and those would be the ones that have the same billing address because if we convert from the sub-customer to the project then uh then it's going to have to have the same billing address as the parent because now it's going to be the parent otherwise otherwise you can't make a project of it because it has a separate address and you if that's the case then that might be a reason why you still might use uh the sub-customers so you can make a project that basically ties out to it so if you're thinking that you're going to import from QuickBooks desktop to online it's likely that you might have to pull in these items of sub-customers and then when you want to make them into the projects to use the cool new feature which might be a thing that pulled that that drew you into it uh to the move then you might have to convert the sub-customers which it looks like they're getting better at making that conversion an easier thing to do let's go over and look at the projects so notice the projects by default were basically on when i went in here uh if they're not on you can go into the cog up top and you can go into the account and settings and within the advanced area you have your project so i'm advanced we have the projects they are turned on if i click on it you just have the toggle the toggle it on or off so there is our projects once on then do you want to leave without saving yes then you'll have your projects tab on the left hand side it says run your projects with confidence make better decisions by knowing how your jobs are doing you can watch a video on it profitability in one place profitability by job that is organize your project finances with a clear view of profits keep track of your labor costs see where your team is spending time and how it affects your profit margins eliminate the guesswork understand which projects make money and where you should focus your efforts all right let's start the project so then the project i'm just going to call this one generic project number one and then we have to notice there's an asterisk here we have to assign it to a customer so that's going to be mandatory of the projects now if i had a customer that had a subcustomer i could assign it to the subcustomer which again i might still do if there was a different like billing address or something but i'm just going to assign this one to the parent customer so that we can do some comparing and contrasting of what the functionality looks like if we had a sub job or a subcustomer versus a project so i'm going to select uh jones guitars by the way you might look at the term of projects and start thinking that you would like to break out certain things that you that like another income account because what happens with the projects is basically we can we can run the income statement by project that we're working on is one of the one of the benefits that will basically have when we break out the projects and we can also see it in its own little little place now because now we have the projects with more functionality than we had with the subcustomers so you might think well what if i have a particular project in my business and i and like like i have a particular meeting or i go to a particular concert or something or particular uh i went to a i went to a new a new idea for my business and then i applied that new idea and i want to see the revenue that was generated from that new idea or something like that that's not really what the projects are for because you have to assign it to a customer so all of the money has to be assigned to so it works kind of like the jobs what might you use that functionality for you might use class tracking for something like that you might use the location tracking could possibly be used and the tags those are the other features that can break out the income statement by column so so you so if you had a particular a particular revenue location or something that you went to a conference and you applied some new thing and you want to see the the profit and loss that is tagged to that new thing or that tagged to a to a certain lead generator that you made or something like that and you could tag the revenue lines and the expense lines related to that particular lead or something well then that's something you might use class tracking are more likely like tags in that case which can still break out the income statement by that particular thing this thing is going to be breaking out the income statement by the jobs which have to be assigned to the customer okay so any case let's let's bring this back January 1st the end date i'm not going to put an end date because i don't really know and then typically when we think about the jobs we have the the status of it's either in progress it's completed or it's has been cancelled so in progress means you know we've started up we've started up the job and it's it's moving at this point in time we're working on it completed of course means that the job is ended so it's now closed so it would kind of be like moving the job from the ones that we're working on to the ones that have been closed and cancelled means you know it was in progress and then of course it has been cancelled so let's go ahead and say we're going to say it's in progress we can add notes if we need to and then if i go into the job here's our little thing to tell us about it your project at a glance see your project's performance end to end track income and all your costs include including labor so it's going to track everything follow the money see your project organized by income and costs to make sure you stay profitable all right and then see how time is being spent you can add your team's time and know what they worked on and how it affects your project cost so basically we've got basically the income and the costs which are now can be broken out by particular projects so when i assign invoices and whatnot and uh and expenses i can assign them to a particular project so for example i won't record an invoice right now but just to show you if we hit the plus button we've got the invoices over here but you could also do that here by by i'm in the project here i'm going to close up the hamburger and in this drop down you can see i have the invoice receipt payment expense estimate and so on and so forth so this is another area that i can add an invoice for example so i'm going to say let's just do an invoice from here and then if i was to invoice this would be the revenue side of things and then we have the assigning of the project because it's assigned to project number one it's not assigned to the sub-customer it's assigned to the project so that so if i close this back out and say leave without saving i'm going to say yes leave without saving that's that and then if i had an expense side of things money is going out the money would still go out of the checking account but now it's going to go out of the checking account and i'm going to assign it to a project so i'm assigning it to a project over here why does that matter because when i assign it to the project it'll still populate on the income statement like normal but it'll also populate in here so i can see it each of these projects tracking by the project now also it would be nice if i can break out my income statement by project which would so if i run my income statement report if i was to run it if you select the drop down we've got the product and services we've got well i'm sorry here we've got the vendors or customers so we can break out the basically the income statement in essence by customer which could include say the sub customers so that's where the sub customers can come into play let's add another uh tab i'm going to right click and duplicate a tab so we can look at possibly a project report and then we're going to go to the reports on the left hand side close up the hamburger and i'm going to type in project so we have a project profitability summary report nothing's currently in it at this point in time but there you have it now notice that when you think about the projects notice that when you're looking at one individual project it's great to be going in here and being able to see what is happening within a particular project and run reports for that particular project however it's often the case that you that you will want to run a report for a job cost system that has all of the projects right that are that are that are currently in play and so that's why you might it'd be it's nice to be able to run a report that's going to have basically all the projects that should tie in to basically your income statement when you're trying to do like your financial reporting so so the thing that if i go back on over here the thing that this report does great is it gives you more of an an isolated view on each individual project in its own little its own little space here but when you do external reporting and then in financial statement creation then you're you still want might want to be running reports which is going to be breaking out basically all of your projects again we'll get into that in more detail in future courses or sections that are focused more on projects and job cost systems in particular okay so we have the overview so on the overview we've got the income and the expenses we've got the invoices the expenses bills and hours that we can have these are the transactions by the project the time activity and the project reports for the particular project and then you've got the attachments that we can add we have the drop down up top so it says not started completed or canceled so we can change the the status of the project we can go back to the all projects up top and that takes us to our home page which will typically go in if i open the hamburger whenever we directly go into the projects and so now the home page has the status drop down so if i go to all status or if i went to canceled there's nothing in it the only thing in it right now is the in progress and then we have customers we only have the one customers so we could sort by customers if we so choose and then the employee rates so the hourly cost and the payroll expenses and then we can go into the particular project as we were before going into the project and now we're inside that particular project let's just do one more i'm going to go back to the project so we can just see two projects in here and mirror them to the sub customers so i'm going to say new project up top and i'm going to say this is going to be i'm just going to call it project to project to and then i'm going to link it to it this is an asterix field i have to have it to sam the guitar man not to the sub customer but i just want to compare and contrast the differences between a project and a sub customer so we're going to say there it is and i'm going to say the start date is in the beginning of january again and it is once again in progress so we're going to go ahead and save it and so there it is so it opens up and now we're inside the project i'm going to go back to the all projects so now when we go into this field we see our two projects and we can go in there individually so if i open up my hamburger note that although these projects are tied to customers as you can see they have their own area outside of the customer center which if i go to the to the customer center is in the sales area so if i go to the sales area and then customers you can see we basically tied a project to jones and sam the guitar man uh and and that can be found separately in you know the projects area over there and then these two are the sub customers so that's going to be but when we get into the billing of the projects it's going to be bill two the uh jones it's going to you know the the project one to jones guitars and project two to uh sam the guitar man so that's the general idea we'll do some a little bit of uh billing to the particular projects we'll play with some time and look a little bit at the differences between the sub customers and the projects but again we get into it a lot more detail in uh future courses and sections that specialize in a job cost type of system the main thing i just want to point out with these is make sure if you're working in this area the first thing you got to get down is kind of the terminology a job cost system is going to use the term jobs but they could use jobs to refer to the quick books tool that we're using which could have been the old jobs in the desktop version which are now called sub customers in the new version and the sub customers the coolest newest thing is to convert the sub customers generally to the to the projects so the projects are basically kind of like the jobs uh now that now have their own kind of place within the within quick books their own portal within quick books that's kind of like the general overview now there's nothing happened to the reports we haven't entered anything new so the trial balance is still standing we're still standing on those same two legs we haven't even moved we're just standing still here just hanging listen to your babble just standing there watching your babble so there it is