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Here we are in our custom zero home page going into the new company file get great guitars that we set up in a prior presentation duplicating some tabs like we do every time to put the financial statements in right click in the tab up top to duplicate right click in the tab up top again to duplicate back to the tab to the middle we want to go to the accounting drop down open up the balance sheet then I'm going to tab to the right accounting drop down again this time the income statement tabbing back to the middle drop down on the date custom date range we want to go for 2023 the end of it the 31st of December update that report going back to the tab to the right we got the correct date range here so that looks good let's go to the first tab we're now going to look at projects so note that if you don't have the projects on I already have the tab top for projects I believe you can go into the drop down here and there'll be projects and then there'll be a screen to just click it to turn on your projects and at that point you should have your projects tab on the right hand side and we can go into basically all projects and we haven't set up any projects yet at this point in time so I just want to give a little bit of background on the projects and basically what has happened in accounting software in general before this and why it has basically happened because the projects are usually used for a specialized type of area usually when you have a job cost kind of system so I'm going to jump back on over here to the QuickBooks desktop flow chart just to look at the flow chart here because the accounting flow will be basically the same and all the accounting systems including zero and we're basically looking at the revenue cycle which is represented in the customer cycle here remembering that when we're looking at the revenue cycle it will be dependent on not just our decision as to whether we want a cash based system or a cruel based system but rather on the industry that we are in so if we're just getting paid by youtube we can wait till it clears the bank use bank feeds recorded as revenue at that time that's quite easy if we sell at a food truck or a restaurant or in a store with a cash register we're typically forced to collect the payments and then we have this grouping issue that we have to deal with so that we can have that intermediary process of taking the money that we receive physical cash or credit card or whatever and put it in the bank in the same fashion as it will be shown on the bank statement to help us with the bank reconciliations and then if we actually do the work first such as a landscaping firm bookkeeping firm and so on we do the work then invoice the client then receive the payment and make the deposit so when we're talking about a project type system if you have longer term projects you have an added level of complexity with the revenue recognition oftentimes because now you're in a system where say you're doing a construction project over multiple years uh then you're gonna say well when should i be recognizing the revenue because i'm probably going to be needing to be collecting money as the project is going on and usually revenue recognition happens at the point in time the work is done in other words normally when the work is done that's when we make the invoice and send it out to the client and that's when the revenue is recorded at the point in time we make the invoice or we do the work at the same point in time we collect the money such as a food truck or something and therefore when we create the receive money form that's when we record the revenue but if you're doing a long term job then you're going to be collecting possibly cash but you haven't finished the job yet at that point in time so then the question is well since it's a long term job should you be recording revenue as the job goes and there's different revenue recognition principles like completed contract or percentage of completion and you also uh want to be able to track by job so in other words we have particular customers but we might have multiple jobs that we have for the particular customers and we'd like to be able to run reports by the job reports now note this is somewhat of a specialized type of industry so if you're a bookkeeper or something like that then you want to think do you want to be taking on clients that have a job cost kind of system and it might be an area that you can specialize in if you get quite good at that kind of system then you have skills most likely that other people haven't developed and you can build your whole your whole bookkeeping system around a particular industry oftentimes now when we look at these longer term jobs oftentimes they have inventory like a construction kind of job where you're dealing with you know a lot of physical materials but you can have a similar kind of system if it's a job cost system for a service-based company so a classical setup for a law firm a cpa firm a bookkeeping firm is basically a job cost system because you're picking up particular jobs from the clients and then you can have a pool of workers that are going to be assigning their time to particular jobs and you're billing out their time to particular jobs so that's kind of a job cost kind of system as well now it used to be when the job cost system first came in play they had what was called jobs oftentimes if you look at like the precursors to the online softwares like zero they had they had actual jobs and then they called them sub-customers so that would be in the contacts over here if you looked at the actual contacts they had sub-customers so you can have like a customer and then the sub-customer and then you can run your reports by sub-customer and so on and track your jobs that way now for the most part for the online softwares like zero they've put in this nice functionality of the projects so now the projects are housed in their own little space over here which is great but however note that they still kind of act like the jobs because the projects are typically going to be assigned to a particular customer so a lot of times when people see projects they start to imagine different things they can do with it they start to say well I can I can then put you know a particular project I did for for an ad revenue campaign that I want to track the money that I received that was related to the ad revenue campaign or something like that that's not really what the projects are designed for because you're going to have you need to tie it to a particular customer so it's really like an an increase in the level up of the kind of job or sub-customer functionality so that we can track a particular job data if you want to track like categories of things then you can use other tools possibly like a like a class tracking or other tools like that and we might talk about that later right and in that case a lot of times we might want to break out the income statement you know by different by different categories by assigning transactions to different categories and we can imagine a system where we can basically break out the the columns on the income statement uh by by category but the projects are typically going to be a tied to to a customer and therefore they kind of act like a an advanced jobs thing even though they have their own little field over here so if we go into the projects then we've got the drop down you've got the time entry staff and staff permissions staff costs we'll just give a quick little summary here and then we'll enter some mock projects I'm going to go into the all projects so we've got the drafts we've got in project progress and closed noting that when you're dealing with projects and longer term types of jobs these are classical categories of the jobs right you you're starting you haven't yet approved the job and then the job is in progress when you're working on it and then when you're done with the job then you can mark the job as closed and that's going to be a classing class tracking we've got the timer we've got the reports and this is one of the cool things that you that's nice that you have your projects broken out separately because then you can look at your reports here within the project section detail time project detail project time and so on and so forth and then in the new button we've got the new draft or a new in progress so if you're going to set up a new item that was a draft you can put it in a draft if it's going right in the project has been accepted and you're starting to assign you know costs to it and what not then we're going to go into a project so I'm going to go into a new project we have the contact notice you have to put a contact up top and these are generally going to be our customers I'm going to say Jones guitars we could have multiple multiple jobs for that customer now I'm just going to name the job or project a number 3005 obviously in practice you might want to be more detailed and say you know what you're doing for that particular project but we're going to just give a generic number of the project and so we're going to say number in the project deadline if you have an end date for the deadline you could put that there estimate calculate from tax and estimated expenses so if I select that we have our estimates notice that when you deal with the job you're typically going to have to enter oftentimes the process is you start with an estimate of how much the job is going to be because it's a long-term job you don't know exactly how much it will cost and then you're going to actually do the job and then you have some different setups that could be available in terms of whether or not you stick to the estimate or whether you update the estimate for what actually costs on the job so who can view this project public anyone with access private admin and so on so I'm just going to create it like so so now we've got our job is set up we're in Jones guitar 3005 so notice how it's it's formatted here we're basically going to be billing in essence to Jones guitars but we got a specific job for a specific thing that we're doing for them we've got our tasks up top we've got our time we've got our quotes and invoices we've got our profitability which is basically kind of like an income statement which is kind of what you can think of as being tracked here like a an income statement for that's being assigned to a particular job we're gonna have income and expenses for a particular job you've got your timer up top hold on a sec close that you've got your ad task estimated expense expense form and expense from a bill and then we have our invoices deposits and project amount so we'll start assigning things out to it in and test it out in a future presentation but if I just look at like say uh an invoice for example so I'm gonna say open draft invoice here and then within the invoice we have assigned to project down below so if I go into the assigned to project you got the assigned item to a project and then it's going to 3005 so you could say okay boom and you could see up top it's going to jones guitars but it's then you can assign it to the project with that there so we'll talk more about assigning items to the projects in a future presentation but you can see as you enter the data into the system when you assign them to the projects then you can basically track your information by project which will then show up if I go up on over here again and go into all projects uh in here and you can track basically the the infer the estimate the invoicing the time and so on and then the profitability will basically be like a little income statement within the projects uh the profit that is the invoice minus the costs so as you're entering transactions related to a particular project such as invoicing and uh then expense forms if I go up top and say we have a uh spend money form for example I'm going to say it comes out of a checking account I'm not actually going to record it but just to take a look at it then we have the same option down here assign expense to a customer uh or project right so we could assign them down there which we will do more in future presentations okay so then I'm going to go back into the projects now note that you also have reports that you might be able to generate by project so let's go to the tab to the right right click on it and duplicate and then so you have the reports that you can generate within the projects which are basically per project right a report for the information assigned to that particular project and then you might want to run a report that has all the projects on it so you can say project project uh you got the project detail uh project detail project details time and expense project summary project summary and uh the project financials detail time and so on so you've got your project reports that you can generate within the reports area all right so let's go back on over to the projects let's add one more so I'm going to go back into the uh in progress so I'm in the in progress here's our list of projects down below we only have one of course at this point in time so I'm going to say new up top and I'm going to say new in progress and I'm going to say this one's going to be for let's say Sam the guitar man which is a customer we've already set up so it has to be tied to a customer and I'm just going to give it a name or number for the project and that's all I'm going to do and we'll say create that one and so there we have it so if I go back to all projects up top if I go back into all projects we've got now our two projects in the in progress area if I go to the tab to the right we can edit it we can duplicate it we can delete it and so on up top and we have the draft up top in progress and change it to closed when we need to which would be moving it between these three categories up top and then if I go into Sam the guitar man we've got the same kind of layout in here the tasks the time the quotes and invoices the profitability and basically in the profitability we have our you know income statement in essence for those line items that we are assigning to a particular project which we'll talk about in a little bit more detail in future presentations but just note again the projects in a job cost system is like a specialty area and we can have you know easily have a whole course multiple courses you know on different kind of job cost systems so be keep that in mind again if you're a bookkeeper one of the things you want to do is try to think think about what what area do you want us to be specializing in do you want businesses that you can basically automate and try to do as easy as possible on a cash-based system or do you want some businesses that are going to clearly take more time because of more complexities such as tracking inventory in some ways and oftentimes in a job you know longer-term job cost kind of systems why would you want to do that because less people have those skills so those more specialized skills are more you know could be a more a good marketable place to be so no impact on the income statement or balance sheet no changes at this point in time so we don't need to pull up the trial balance so we'll continue on next time