 QuickBooks Online 2023 Class Tracking versus Projects versus Location Tracking versus Tags versus Subcustomers or Jobs Overview. Get ready to earn the skills needed to boost your bank books on up with QuickBooks Online 2023. Here we are in our QuickBooks Online test company file. Remember the two ways you may be able to practice with QuickBooks Online possibly for free is one utilized a free 30-day trial often offered by Intuit. Intuit being the owner of QuickBooks best way to get there I believe is to go to the Intuit website intuit.com search for QuickBooks and then I would go all the way to the bottom of the page where they have the products down here and then search for QuickBooks Online and then you'll be able to see hopefully at this point in time the free 30-day trial here and this little toggle button for the free 30-day trial here. 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Use a different browser if you're using Google Chrome you can then also use the incognito mode to have them open at the same time which you could find by going to the three dots and go to the new incognito window opening an incognito browser type in QuickBooks Online test company file and then search for the option that has into it the owner of QuickBooks in the URL. Now we're going to be in the accountant view as opposed to the business view you can toggle between the two views by going to the cog up top and then switching the views on down below. Now we want to take a look at some of those cool tools QuickBooks Online provides us allowing us to better track and categorize our data including class tracking projects location tracking tags and sub customers which used to be called jobs. Although these tools give us a lot more flexibility they also come with problems possibly leading to paralysis at times for multiple different reasons. One is just because there's a lot of them which is a little bit overwhelming. Two is that the functionality of these tools can sometimes overlap on each other. So for example if you have a particular thing that you would want to do you could pick multiple of these tools that might be able to accomplish that task leading to the question of which tool would be the best tool to use for the particular task we want to get done. Three you might be trying to integrate multiple of these tools into your accounting system so when we try to stack them together and see how the interplay between these tools will work that can add a lot of confusion a lot more kind of options as well. And four if you've learned accounting from like a textbook kind of situation you're basically learning a double entry accounting system. Some of these tools what they're really doing is kind of adding another dimension so the double entry accounting you can think of doing on like an excel spreadsheet in a two-dimensional kind of system and now they're breaking out the data in like another dimension right so now we're going to have basically an income statement with multiple columns that could of course be quite confusing to first try to grasp just the double entry accounting system is quite complex in and of itself and now when you add this you know third dimension that we're going to be breaking things out in that is going to be confusing at first and then when you look at different options to do that that gets more confusing so first what we want to do is just kind of look at these tools in chronological order for the most part as they basically came up and then we'll get into each of the individual tools in and of themselves which tools might be the best ones to do for a particular kind of thing that you're trying to accomplish and then how the tools might interplay on each other when you might use multiple tools at the same time chronologically the first tool we had was called jobs back in the old quickbooks desktop version when it was converted to quickbooks online they changed the terminology from job to sub customers they're linked to customers as the name would indicate so in the sales tab on the left hand side your customers up top i've got three generic customers here if i had a job cost type of system it's possible that i would have multiple jobs for example tied to customer number one like if i was in construction i might have a job doing a patio versus a job building a wall or something and those would be separate jobs that i would like linked to customer number one to make a job or sub customer i can go to the new button up top and then i'm just going to name it a number 400 let's say and i'm going to make it a sub customer of customer number one now i can make it billable or not billable to the customer so i'll keep that as the default and then i'm going to save it and it shows up as our sub customer here now to some degree this this concept has been taken over by the projects to some degree in it in like a job cost system which we'll talk about shortly but the projects are only available if you've got quickbooks pro plus i think or above if you have something below that then you might be able to do similar kind of things still with a with a sub customer setting and you can also use those two things in alignment so the fact that you have projects doesn't necessarily mean that you're never going to use sub customers because you might tie a project to basically a sub customer the basic idea here would be that you're going to assign items to the customer and then when you run reports you can run reports by customer so for example if i go up top right click and duplicate the tab so i can put a report in the tab to the right we can go to the reports on the left hand side open up a profit and loss let's change the range up top from 010123 to 123123 run it and then i can run it by customer which will break it out up top by customer which will also include the jobs it'll give us a breakout basically of the jobs up top so when we when we think about the next dimension what are these doing from a report standpoint a lot of the times we're thinking about the profit and loss and breaking the profit and loss from a single column document to multiple columns which will be broken out in this case by customers which also include the sub customers and then we'll get into classes and and so on and so forth now the the next thing that happened chronologically i believe was the class tracking now notice that the the jobs kind of most closely aligned to the projects the projects kind of overtakes some of the functionality of the jobs but i think chronologically the next tool that came in place was the class tracking so let's take a look at that to do the class tracking you got to turn on class tracking so note that if i open up a normal kind of invoice or something without class tracking then it won't have this class tracking field in it and that'll be easier because then you'll have less fields when you do the data input but if you want to do class tracking then you want to turn this on and you'll have these data input fields of course now where's the class tracking located it's in the cogs up top settings on the left hand side under the advanced tab and then you've got your categories both class tracking and location tracking are in the same area but location tracking actually came up a lot later it's a lot it's much newer of a function and it's kind of a variant of course on the class tracking so let's first just look at the class tracking here to turn it on obviously you toggle on the class tracking and with the class tracking you'll be able to assign a class to not only every transaction but every line item of the transaction the general goal will be similar to what we saw with the project with the with the sub customers we could run reports primarily an income statement but you also have some functionality on the balance sheet to run reports by class which adds another column of the classes and then you've got your option down here to uh one uh one to enter transaction and one to each row of the transaction now one of the benefits of the class tracking is usually you're going to want them on each row or that's one of the differences between it and location tracking so for example uh if i use that standard default i'm going to say save it and we go into our invoice or something that we're going to enter into the system then you've got your classes field and it's for every line item so if i had multiple line items in my field i can assign a class to each of the line items instead of assigning one class to every line item so so that's kind of nice when you then run the reports you're typically thinking again income statement reports primarily although the classes have some options for other reports you can hit the breakdown here by classes so now you've added another dimension up top this time not broken out by customer and project or sub-customer but by class and so you can see you can use the classes for some similar things if you're trying to break out the concept up top by jobs for example then you could assign classes as the jobs and do a similar kind of thing as you could with the sub-customers but you can also use classes you know for other things or use them both together which we'll talk more about later all right then that was the classes then i think the next thing that came up chronologically i'm pretty i'm not completely sure chronologically but i'm pretty sure that the next thing was not the location tracking but rather the projects so the projects over here and this is where they deviated and they basically left the desktop version kind of behind because i don't think they have they don't have projects on the desktop version and they added this kind of nice feature in the online version so if you go into projects now we can we can add basically a project now the projects you can think of as kind of to some degree a more advanced than sub-customers it's only available if you have quickbooks pro plus or higher so you need to have if you're in a lower version than that you might be able to do a similar thing with with the with the sub-customers and possibly tags but the projects allow you to get this whole separate area tracking by project so you can open up a project here i can go into the project and then i can track income and expenses by project tying invoice and expenses to the project projects also have a pretty nice our integration with the the payroll so you might be able to actually assign payroll which has been some of the has been a kind of a problematic issue with some of the other methods in a job cost system and then you've got your own project reports and you can track all the transactions by project so it's so it's kind of a level up of a job costing kind of thing and then you can run reports in a similar fashion as we did before let's open up the reports again i can run reports over here and a profit and loss and i could run them by customers again and when i run them by customers the projects will show up again that's why it's kind of similar to the to the job cost kind of system because you're going to have the project that you can run that way you can also run a project's report which is a little bit more summarized of of a type of report and then you've got these internal reports over here which are going to be run per project so you can go into your projects over here and go into a particular project and the project reports here and run the reports within the projects so so then the so the project's kind of replaced to some degree the sub customers however you might use them in conjunction because you might for example want to add a sub customer and then tie the project to the sub customer so if i was to say that we want to uh i'm sorry a new project i'm going to go back on over here and say i want a new project then i have to assign it to a customer but i could assign it to a sub customer so i might for example have customer number one but then i have a different billing area for this particular job therefore i create a sub customer and then i tie the project to the sub customer so the sub customer is going to be billed to to the i'm sorry the project's going to be billed to the sub customer which is basically linked to the customer number one so you can see so so that's how you can kind of use those in alignment so sub customers aren't completely obsolete even though you're probably going to use jobs if you have the capacity to in a lot of ways that you wouldn't use sub customers before to do a job cost type of system okay then i think they added the location tracking so the location tracking as you can see is in the same area we saw before i'm going to go to the cog and then the settings on the left it's in the advanced items down below and the same place where we had the class tracking we've got the location tracking so here's the location tracking now it's similar to the class tracking uh except now it's assigned to every transaction so it would be similar to the to the class tracking if i chose this option to have one class per transaction but the cool thing about classes is that you can assign a different class to each line item within the transaction whereas the location tracking you're gonna have the whole location assigned to one location now the drop down here you can call it you can call it location property store business this line item is what's going to show up when you sort it on the report so the fact that it says location here doesn't mean that you have to do it by location you can use the location tracking to break out whatever you want in a similar way as with the class tracking but the location tracking is actually a little a little less robust in some ways than the class tracking because the payroll like you have some more limitations on the payroll we'll dive into later and and again you have to assign it to the whole transaction but not to each line line item of the transaction so to me for most cases if you still have the capacity to use class tracking that's probably the number one option you would use because it has more flexibility if you're already using class tracking and you want to assign another item in a similar way as class tracking but have a whole different set of columns that are going to show up on the income statement then i would go you know to the location tracking so for example if i turn that on and we're going to say okay i think it was already on and i go to the new button and invoice now i've got the location which is i haven't called territory up here but that's the location i can add a location and i can add a class to the same transaction so possibly i use these in conjunction possibly i have two regions in the country california and and and and um nevada let's say and i can say i can tag these to california or nevada for the entire transaction and down here maybe i tag further by uh department so it's going to be admin you know versus sales or something like that or i can just use classes and i can say what if i have a subclass and so these are some again some different interplays which one would be better we'll dive into that in more detail in the future but location tracking primarily your thinking income statement accounts if i go back on over here i can sort by class customer or now locations which is called territories because that's what i switched it to on the so it's called territories in here and i can run it and now i'm going to get my my columns up top broken out by territory so now it's pretty neat because i get my whole profit and loss which is now broken out by territory or i can break it out by classes this way or i can break it out by the customers so then there's a questions of well which one do i want to use the location tracking for which one do i want to use class tracking for which one do i want to use the the customers for and whatnot and then the last one that came along was called tags and tags uh has a couple things that are are neat to it one is that what if you've already used all the classes that you want and you've already used the location tracking and then you you want to be able to break out your income statement by some other category other than the classes and locations that you've already used so you've already you're using classes for let's say the departments you're using the locations for the actual locations and then i also want to break out like by sales rep or something like that uh or or by like an advertising project campaign or something like that i want to tag more transactions and break out primarily income statement accounts by those or if you're in a system where you don't have quickbooks pro plus or above and you only have the the prior versions you i think you still have access to tags but not to the classes possibly or locations or projects and therefore you might use tags in a similar way as you would use projects or uh so that's what so so the tags to get to the tags you can go one way to get there as you go to the the tool up top and in the lists you've got your tags so here's your tags and then you can you can basically add uh new tags in here now the tags are a little bit kind of uh i call it like a little walk here a little bit funny because if i add the tags and i just go to a normal profit and loss i don't always get the tags over here i think i've got this ungrouped tags but all the tags that i make don't always show up over here but if i open up the reports from the tags area then i have the filtering options uh by the tags so those that's a quick overview of them kind of uh but but notice there's a lot of overlap so now we can get into ideas of which one would be best for the task uh at hand when would we use each of these tasks and then when we have multiple of them together then how do they interplay with each other because i could run something for example by classes and then i could customize and filter you know by territory which is the location one right and so i can kind of play with these two things together how do they how do they play together so we'll dive into some more details on that in future presentations