 QuickBooks Online 2023, sub-customers or jobs. 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 using the accountant view as opposed to the business view you can toggle between the two views by going to the cog up top and switch the view down below, duplicating some tabs to put reports in like we do every time. Right-click in the tab up top to duplicate it. Right-click in the duplicated tab to duplicate it again. Tapping to the middle so we can go to the reports on the left and open the balance sheet report. One of the two faves. Going to the tab to the right, reports on the left. This time the other favorite report, the profit loss otherwise known as the income statement. Closing the hand boogie, scrolling up to the top, changing the range. We're going to look at 2025 this time cause it's got some blank space for us to put data in now. 010125 to 123125, run it, nothing's there. That's what we want cause we're going to put stuff there shortly, tab to the middle, close the hand boogie, scroll up to the top, 2025 again, 010125, 123125 and run it. Okay, let's tab to the left. Now we're going to focus just on the sub-customers which used to be called the jobs and the desktop view and focus just in on it. Remembering that the sub-customers are closest related to the projects which kind of supplanted or took over. Support accounting instruction by clicking the link below giving you a free month membership to all of the content on our website broken out by category, further broken out by course. Each course then organized in a logical, reasonable fashion making it much more easy to find what you need than can be done on a YouTube page. We also include added resources such as Excel practice problems, PDF files and more like QuickBooks backup files when applicable. So once again, click the link below for a free month membership to our website and all the content on it. Some of the things that you would prior have used sub-customers for doing but sub-customers haven't gone away and you could use these two things in conjunction with each other or sometimes you might not have access to projects because you might have an earlier version or something like that and you might be using sub-customers or you might have an older accounting system that basically possibly from QuickBooks desktop that was transferred over or whatever or you were using it before they had the projects and so you'd be using sub-customers possibly in that instance as well. All right, so if we go into the sub-customers we're gonna go down to the or up to the sales tab and we're gonna go to the customers on the right-hand side. So the whole idea of the sub-customer is that we're gonna have our customers which if we're in a job cost type of system are the people that we're basically going to be billing for and then we'll have the sub-customers which will be the actual jobs that we are doing. So we could have multiple jobs for one customer and then we can track in our financial statements to break out of the activity by customer and sub-customer and track possibly like open and closed jobs. So we won't get into too much depth on a job cost system now in terms of the details of it but just to get a general idea we set up a sub-customer last time. Let's set up a couple more sub-customers just so we can get a good feel for what the reports look like with the sub-customers. So we've got, let's add another one. I'm gonna say another sub-customer and I'm just gonna number the sub-customers as if they're gonna be job numbers but of course you could put a lot more detail in the sub-customers as well. I'm gonna put four 10 for this one and then I'm just gonna say it's a sub-customer. I'm gonna say it's a sub-customer once again of customer number one and I'm gonna make it a bill to the parent customer. So that's gonna be the general concept usually. So now we've got our two sub-customers here. I'm gonna go back to the primary window and so now you can see the two sub-customers which I'm basically just calling jobs here. Now we could also set up a new customer and let's say this was a 415. If we set up a whole new billing item here we can make this for customer number one again and then again if we wanted to build the sub-customer we can uncheck that and say build the sub-customer. This is gonna be checked on by default. So let's add that one and so now we've got these three sub-customers or you might call them jobs as they would be called in the desktop version that are connected to customer number one. Let's make a couple for number two customer. So I'll say add another one. Let's make this just a different number and structure just so I can differentiate them. I'm gonna make it a sub-customer for customer number two. Okay, and then let's add another one. Add another one, hold on back to my customer list. New again, let's make this 512 and this is gonna be once again for a sub-customer for customer number two. Okay, so then the general process would be that we're gonna be having expenses and whatnot that will come up that we're gonna be applying to a long-term kind of job and we wanna basically be able to break out primarily the income statement but possibly some balance sheet accounts as well by customer and be able to run those reports. So the general concept would be we'll make invoice type of forms and we'll make them billable. So we turned on the billable option before. So if you hit the cog button over here and we go to the account and settings, then expenses on the left-hand side and in the bills and expenses, we said we wanna track the billable expenses and items. Now you can also add a markup as you do that. So you're gonna have an expense. It's gonna pull over to the invoice and then we'll mark it up 30% per line item. Let's just play with that while we're doing this. So I'm gonna say let's say done and boom and then as expenses come up, we're just gonna say let's add an expense. I can hit the plus button over here without that opening. Now let's open it up over here. Expense form and we're gonna say that we had vendor number one. I'm just always gonna use the same vendor just so it's easy and this is gonna be as of 010125 and I have my location in Nevada. I'm not really focused on the locations right now. The tags and whatnot, we're focused on just the sub-customer. So I'm gonna say supplies again and traditionally what we would be purchasing is like cost a good sold type of stuff if it was a long-term job. So let's just set up another account and call it a cost a good sold type of account. Cost a good sold and we've got cost a good sold labor versus rental, let's say materials cost a good sold. Save it, boom and then I'm gonna say it's 2000. Okay, I'll keep it at 2000. It's gonna be billable and then we're gonna assign it to the customer. So it's gonna go to customer, let's say 400 again. And so what's this gonna do? Decrease the checking account. The other side is gonna go to what we assigned here which I believe was cost a good sold on the income statement and then we're gonna have it billable so it'll pull into the invoice and mark it up by that 30% is the general idea. Now note that as we do the markup because I just assigned it to an account which is the cost a good sold account. It's gonna pull into the income statement using the income account that's just kind of generated by QuickBooks. So we could do a little bit more advanced method using items that we might practice later but let's go ahead and save and close it and then we're gonna go to the tab to the right and let's run it. So if I look at a standard balance sheet now we got the checking account went down because that's what we would expect to happen. Now I could run the balance sheet breaking it out by customers and I've got a lot of different customers here so it becomes a long report. That's one of the problems with this method and notice it's in here as not specified some of the balance sheet accounts again don't exactly break out perfectly by customer. If I go back into this and check it out we've got our expense report here and the customer is assigned. So I'm gonna close this out. So balance sheet reports don't always work perfectly. The income statement reports is really where the focus generally is because that's the performance report. So if I refresh this, this is the income statement before we break it out it's in the cost a good sold. If I go up top and I wanna see this by customer so now we could run this not there by customer customer, customer, there it is, boom. Okay so there we have it. Now it's broken out by customer. Now let's pull that in to the income line item and we'll see the income related to that customer as well and notice it has the customer and this is the sub-customer and then the total for the customers adding up all the totals which we'll see more when we add data. So I'm gonna go back to the tab to the left and let's say that we're going to, let's hit the plus button up top and say we're gonna make an invoice now and we will make it for customer number 400 and that's the sub-customer. I can pull in the billable item now. Let's do it. Let's pull it in. Let's do it. And then now we've got, let's keep it on the same date. We'll keep the same date here and so now it's pulling in. Now, if I don't add anything else other than what's put it in here, I could put a description in for what it was put in. So like materials that pulled in then it's just gonna pull into an account that's kind of made up by QuickBooks because I'm not using an item which is the thing that usually drives which account it's gonna be going to. So let's go ahead and just record it and see what it does, see what happens. So this is going to then increase the accounts receivable if I go to the balance sheet. The balance sheet accounts receivable is breaking out by customer. And then if I go to the tab to the right and run this one, now we've got the 2000 billable and the supplies. It didn't mark it up by that 30%. So for some reason that the thing didn't take to mark up by the 30%. Let's do it again and on the next one we'll mark it up by 30%. I just turned it on again. But here we've got the income that pulled in. Notice that it pulled into the billable expense income and then which is an income account that it kind of made up for the billable expense. We couldn't really switch it because we use that billable thing instead of using the items. So let's do it again. This time let's try to use an item with it and let's apply something to 410 this time. So I'm gonna say a new, not new, what am I doing? Plus button up top. Let's make another expense form. And this one we're gonna make it for 410 and let's make this one as of 1.5 let's say and we're gonna say then down here instead of using the category, let's use the item. So I'm gonna use an item now and this is a standard technique for using items if you're gonna try to pull the expense in a job cause type of system over to the invoice so that we have more control on which accounts gonna be hit on the income side when we get to the invoice. So let's hit the dropdown and I'm gonna say new item and this time let's make it a non-inventory because I'm not gonna be tracking the inventory with it. Let's call it materials and so I'm gonna say copy that. It's gonna be materials down here. I'm not gonna add a class or anything. I'll keep it in the services even though it probably should be going into the product. Well, let's put it to product. That's where I should have put the last one. And then I'm gonna have both of these checked off so that when I pull it down to the income statement it's gonna pull in to the income account of sales of product. That's the thing that's a little bit different here and then down here when we purchase it I'm not gonna put it into purchases. I'm gonna put it into cost of supplies and labor cost of goods sold. We're just gonna expense it as we go. All right, so we're gonna save it and then let's put this in there for let's say 500 this time and then I'll make it billable and it should mark it up. So notice now it's marking it up like we wanted it to do last time but I didn't really check it too much. So anyways, that's what's gonna pull into the invoice when we pull it into the invoice. Obviously we could have multiple line items on one of these items too. So if I say add another one, let's say it's gonna be a non-inventory labor and description, same concept, the income account. I'm gonna put it to the sale of products when I pull it over to the invoice and then down here I can put this to cost of goods sold labor and we'll save it and let's say this one was 400 we'll make it billable as well, marking it up 30% when we pull it on over into the invoice. And by the way, this shouldn't be going to customer up top, this should be going to a vendor and that's gonna delete the whole thing. I'm gonna save it, it should be going to a vendor and then down here it's still good. I'm gonna say, okay, so I've recreated it materials and labor and then I'm gonna make it go to the project which I think we're looking at 410 now is the one we want it to be going to. So that's gonna be pulling over when I make the invoice. Okay, what's this gonna do? Decrease cash, other side goes to the expense account driven by the items this time to the cost of goods sold ones and it'll be billable so when I make an invoice for customer project or subcustomer for a 10 it'll pull over. So let's say save and close, tab to the right and run it, running. And so then it's in not specified over here again if I go to the tab to the right and run this one now we've got the expenses that are pulling in to these same accounts it looks to similar to what we did over here even though we did items with this one the items will differ when I pull it now into the income account because instead of just making this billable expense income QuickBooks will now put it into the income account that we prescribed by the item. So if I go back to the first tab and just do that plus button invoice and then we're gonna say this time we wanna do 410 and we'll pull in both of these items we can just add all of them. And so that looks good, that looks good. So now it's got the materials and it's got the markup that it pulled in and it's also got the product or the item. So the item is what's gonna drive it to the income account that we wanted it to be going to. So then, so that looks good. So it's gonna increase accounts receivable. The other side is going to be going to the income account to the accounts that we prescribed it to be going to and it'll be broken out by customer job or sub-customer. So let's save it and close it, tab to the right and run it. Now this one, I think breaks out the accounts receivable. So now the accounts receivable are breaking out whereas the cash wasn't. And I believe that's because when you look at the form for the invoice, we're assigning it to a customer on the invoice whereas the checking account because we're not assigning the customer to the full transaction, we're assigning it per line item. So it's not hitting the cash side of the transaction. I think that's the differentiation. So when we use like classes for the entire or location tracking for the entire transaction then the balance sheet might work out a little bit better in those cases, we'll experiment with that later when we get to classes. But if I tab to the right, now we've got the income, the markup and the sales pulling over for this customer or sub-customer and it pulled to the account that we wanted it to, QuickBooks still made up kind of another account for the markup. So if you do the markup that way, QuickBooks kind of mixed up another account but you get a little bit more control on where it's gonna go as opposed to that billing one where it's just gonna make up kind of an account which isn't, I don't think that's ideal because you kind of like to have the control. But in any case, here's the customer, we've got the two jobs for that customer and then here's the total for customer number one. So now let's do one for the second customer just so we can see customer number two and see how this kind of expands our reports are gonna get kind of unwieldy if we have a lot of customers gonna be a lot of line items, a lot of columns. So if I go again and say, okay, let's do this again and say we have an expense again and let's say this one's for sub-customer 501 on like the eighth, let's say and I'm gonna use my item technique down here and we're gonna say materials this time. Let's say, let's say 6,000. We're gonna make it billable and customer, customer five, oh, I did it again, hold on. This isn't a customer up top. This is the vendor that we're doing. Do you want to pre-fill? No. Okay, we're paying the vendor. Now the fact that we're paying a vendor is why I believe the balance sheet accounts the cash account isn't gonna be breaking out by customer because this vendor isn't indicating which customer we deal with as opposed to the invoice where the invoice has the customer up top. So, but when I assign it line item by line item I'm assigning the customer per line item. So I can't assign the customer to the checking account because there's no line item for the checking account because the checking account is just the other side of the transaction driven by the expense form. It's bottom line here. There's nothing to assign this to the customer field. Okay, so let's do it again. Spitted out, I can't really talk yet. I'm still warming up here. Let's do the next one is 1,500. And then we'll say this one also goes to customer 2501. Okay, this is gonna decrease the checking account. The other side's gonna go to the cost of goods sold driven by the items, save it and close it, tab into the right in it and then run in it. And so it decreased the checking account. And so let's do that. And then let's go then to, I believe it decreased the checking account, right? If I go into it. Let's just double check that. If I could drill and drill and down. So there it is. I don't think I refreshed it. And then let's go back, back on over. So that looks more correct. It's been refreshed now. All right, and then if I tab to the right and we run this report, now we've got customer number two and the subcustomer. So now we got customer number one activity and then the total for customer number one. And then customer number two and the subcustomer or job related to that total for subcustomer number two. And then the total line, which is our total income statement. The fact that we have this long report that actually kind of sums up horizontally to the total could be quite nice when we're trying to figure out problems with our job costing kind of system. The downside of course is that once you have a whole lot of customers, you're gonna get a very expansive report that is gonna have a lot of horizontal line items to it. And if you have a lot of customers that aren't job related customers, it might be difficult to kind of differentiate. Like if you're selling other stuff that's not job related in QuickBooks and you have all these other customers in there that you're not trying to track by job, then that could be quite bothersome as well with this type of report. However, note that even if you have like a hundred customers, your report's not gonna be a hundred customers wide if you weren't doing actual jobs on those hundred customers because it's only gonna be showing the activity being the income statement for this time range. So the income statement will just, you know, if there was no activity in this time range even though you had customers that you did work on prior to that, then it's not gonna be showing up in this type of report would be the general idea. So in other words, if I ran this report for 010126 to 123126 and run it, then I still had some activity that I put in the 26 but this isn't the same activity. I don't see customer number two here at all, right? So let's go back on over to 010125 to 123125 and run it. And let's just do at least one more. I think I needed to add the income. Let's pull that on over to the income side, plus button, invoice it. And then on the invoice, we're gonna say that this is gonna be for 501 and pull it in. And so then it pulls in beautifully. And so now we're gonna have accounts receivable going up and the other side going to the revenue accounts driven by the items that we have set up. Let's save it and close it. And then balance sheet account, balance sheet account. The accounts receivable is breaking out properly because the accounts receivable line item can tell what line item it was because we actually assigned the customer to it as opposed to that check the expense account. And then if I go to the tab to the right and we run this one, now we've got the income and the expenses. Let's just do one more in customer number two so we could see this subtotal again. So if I go back on over and we say plus another expense, we could say let's do the second one for customer number two. And let's say this happened on 12 or so. Same kind of concept down here. We'll just say that we had laborer for 3000 billable item and then it's gonna be this one, 512 this time. And then we have materials. Materials for one four, let's say billable and it's gonna go for 512. Okay, so what's this gonna do? Decrease the checking account. I assigned it to a customer again. It shouldn't be a customer. It should be the vendor. No. Okay, now because I'm assigning it to a vendor, then notice it can't really break out this number which is the checking account, the other side of the transaction by customer because there's no line item assigning this one to a customer. These line items which are the income statement side are assigned to the customers. That's why it breaks out the income statement properly I believe and not the checking account. Save it and close it and then run it to the right. Running and so you can see here it didn't break out the cash account like it has been breaking out nicely the AR accounts. So if I go to the tab to the right, run it, then now we've got our another sub account here on 512. So it can get kind of an extensive sheet here but you can see it works, it does its thing quite nicely in a job kind of system so I can break out my income statement by customer although it gets a little bit tedious, so a little bit redundant because you have this concept of the customer and then the sub customers and then the total. So I mean you have basically two extra columns here. I mean sometimes it'd be kind of nice to just run the report by just the jobs to see the open jobs and not having these two redundant columns which can make your report really long. If you were using class tracking, then you can do it that way, right? You could sort it by job and it's a little bit shorter of a report. Then you got customer two, which has the sub customer, sub customer and the total for customer number two and then the total income statement. So one of the primary things that is nice here is that you can run this report that has all of the customers in it and it's got the total so that you can tie everything out to your actual financial statements as opposed to like tags or sometimes when you go into the project reports just the individual reports they just give you the income statement activity by that particular project or job. Great, that's great to zoom in sometimes like that but it's nice to be able to see the whole everything tied out so you can tie it out to your financials. Then you can filter this kind of report by going to the customize up top and you can use your filtering options and if you were using other kind of things as well like classes and location tracking then you can filter, you can run the report by customer and filter by location and class tracking, right? That's one way that you can do it if you don't have location and class tracking then you would most likely filter by customer. So if I wanna focus in on one customer or one job I can say let's just take a look at that, let's take a look at that 415 customer only and run it and I didn't do anything for 415 apparently. Let's run it again, wrong pick, don't pick that one. Let's do it for 410. 410, run it and so there we have it. Now again it's a little bit tedious even when you do this because it's the sub-customers tied to the job so you're gonna have the customer and then the sub-customer, the sub-customers tied to the customer I mean. So you got the customer, the sub-customer and then the total and then the total over here but that's not too bad to deal with, right? So now you can zoom in to each individual job by filtering to each of those individual jobs. So it's a workable kind of system. Now note that the primary thing that happened after sub-customers were in play is the projects. So if you go over to the projects, then like if you were using sub-customers before in another accounting system or jobs before in QuickBooks desktop or sub-customers in QuickBooks online and then they added the jobs then the question is, well do you wanna convert everything over to, I'm sorry, then they added the projects. The question is, do you wanna convert everything over to projects? And I mean, if you have a system that's working, maybe it's not worth it, but they have some conversion concepts that you can look at to try to convert everything to projects but it's still kind of a scary task to do. But the projects are different. They work in a similar fashion so we'll talk more about projects later but you'll see that basically you have your own kind of area that's separate from the customer area that sorts the projects and you've got a little bit more of the sorting tools down here for the projects as opposed to the jobs and then you could run the reports by project. So do the projects then make the jobs or sub-customers obsolete? Not necessarily cause again, you could imagine that you're using sub-customers quite well and thank you very much. I'm going forward quite well with them. You might keep going with that. The projects also add some features like sometimes when you're trying to integrate payroll and stuff into the projects but you might still use the jobs or you could say, hey, look, I would like to have a use the projects but let's say I wanna tie them to a job. So now you're gonna say I'm gonna make a project that ties to a customer. The projects ties to the customer in a similar way as the sub-customers or jobs tie to customers even though it's not in the same window but you might say, hey, look, I've got a customer and then I've got the sub-customer which has a different billing address to the other customer. So I would like to say, yes, it's tied to customer number one but I wanna make the project tied to the sub-customer. So you can see the tiering action you might have, customer number one, then the sub-customer and then you might tie your project for some reasons to the sub-customer. So if I make a project, for example, I have to tie it to a customer instead of actually customer number one, I could tie it to a sub-customer which might be useful for like billing type of purposes. So obviously the sub-customers have it going away. They haven't removed the sub-customers. They are there in a system where you might need them if you don't have access to the projects possibly even if you have access to the projects, if you're using the sub-customers and you're content with the sub-customers because that's what you've been using, then the question is do you wanna try to convert all the sub-customers to projects or are you good going forward with the sub-customers? And then of course you could still use the sub-customers in conjunction in some cases with the projects even if the projects are kind of taking over some of the functionality that the sub-customers would have done in the past. So we'll get into projects more in future presentations.