 QuickBooks Online 2023. Class tracking versus projects versus location tracking versus tags versus subcustomers which used to be called jobs, differences and similarities. Get ready to earn the skills needed to boost your bank books on up with QuickBooks Online 2023. 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. Here we are in our QuickBooks Online test company file using the accountant view as opposed to the business view you could toggle between the two views by going to the cog up top switch the view down below. We're going to duplicate some tabs to put the reports in major two reports that is the balance sheet on the income statement otherwise known as the P&L profit and loss right click in the tab up top to duplicate it right click in the duplicate a tab to duplicate it again so we're going to have our two reports up top and then work on the left tab this is my normal practice I'm going to go to the reports on the left hand side in the middle tab open up the balance sheet as it's thinking tab to the right reports on the left this time the profit and loss report otherwise known as the income statement closing the hamburger we're going to work in the future now I'm going to say 2026 from the future of the recording point here 010126 to 12 3126 and run it and then tab to the middle nothing's in there yet tab to the middle and do the same thing 01010126 12 3126 and run it and close the hamburger so last time we more or less went through all the different options that we have available for sorting our data in chronological order now we want to spend a little bit more time thinking about the similarities and the differences between these options so we turned on most of the options the class tracking the location tracking and the projects and the tags and the sub customers so now we can look at some of the the differences between the two of them now the main thing that between all of them there's more than two but the main thing is usually you're thinking income statement which is the performance report and giving that added dimension to the income statement although some of these tools have a similar option on the balance sheet at least with some of the accounts to break the balance sheet out by these items so let's go ahead and enter some data into the system for each of these and do a little bit of some comparing and some contrasting so the first one was the sub customer so I went into the sales tab and we've got our sub customer here now oftentimes what you would do is enter expenses into the system and possibly pull them over as billable items to this sub customer to do that let's turn on our billable setting and to do that we go to the cog up top we're going to go to the accounting and setting left hand side we're in the expenses on the left and then we want to open up the bills and expenses and I'm going to turn this off we've got make expenses and items billable so we've got this turned on I think it's on by default in the newer but it used to be something you had to turn on but I think they're busy and then I'm going to track the billable expenses and items as income in a single account I want that to be chosen as well and that looks good so I'm going to save it I'm going to say okay and then let's make an expense I'm going to make an expense purchasing something we will imagine for that particular job I'm going to put it then to the sub customer here and we'll say okay this is going to be then then on let's 26 010126 and I'm just going to tap through here and I'm going to add something that we purchased so let's say we purchased then I'm just going to add supplies so we're going to say we purchased supplies I'm just going to expense it as we purchase it expense supplies okay it's in the advertising but that's okay I'll keep it I'll keep it there I'll put it into other business expense okay so we'll say there it is and then let's that's let's say that's for a thousand dollars so then I could make it billable which means I'm going to pull this over to an invoice for the particular customer or in this case job the job is going to be the sub customer and then I'm not going to assign a class to it because right now I'm just thinking in terms of the sub customer so if I record that this is going to decrease the checking account the other side is going to be going into the supplies expense account and then it's also going to be something that can pull into an invoice I'm going to say okay if I go into my balance sheet and run it now I've got the the checking account went down as in a negative field right now tabbing to the right and run it and we've got our income statement which now has supplies now over here I can break this out now by going to the breakout and I say I want to see it by customer and run it now I've got customer number one and then this job which was related to that customer and then the total is linked in there and then my total income statement note I can do a similar thing on the balance sheet with the customers I can I can go to the customers and run it this way but the balance sheet gets a little bit a little bit messy when you start to break it up but you have some functionality with the customers to break out that way and with some of the other tools like tags you may not be able to do it you know break it out in such a way for that if I go back the tab to the right and I say I want to invoice a customer now and I'm going to say it's going to be customer number one sub customer now I can pull in that that billable item to the invoice now there's a couple ways to do this in a job cost system I'm just showing kind of the functionality here you might want to use items and whatnot to pull it in but I'm going to then say that it pulls in the 1000 and let's just keep it at that I'll just say save and close and I think that'll pull into its own income statement account because I didn't use the items so if I run to the to the income statement and run it now we've got this billable expense which is now in the income and then the supplies expense which nets out to a zero on the net income and on the balance sheet accounts receivable is going to be impacted there's accounts receivable broken out by customers so that's pretty that's pretty neat now note that if you were to use the sub customers you have kind of a similar thing except with the sub customers now you've got I mean sorry with the projects you have a similar thing as the sub customers so here are our projects I'm going to make new projects so let's say we're just have a new project we're going to make I'm going to say new project so now I'm going to say that this is going to be let's say let's say project let's just say project one again 1.0 let's say customer is going to be now I can assign it to customer one again or I can assign it to the sub customer so although the project is now work where we're going to be tracking all the stuff and it has its own area over here in the projects it's still kind of like a sub customer because it's usually going to it's going to have to be attached to a customer although it could be attached to a sub customer so that's where there's a lot of overlap the project's kind of taking over the the sub customers but you could still use sub customers in alignment in conjunction with the projects so I'm going to assign it to project customer number one it's going to be in progress for the status of the progress of the project which is another useful field to you know to be able to sort in and then it opens up the project so now it took me into the project field so here's the project I'm in the actual project and it gives me an income statement in its own kind of area so the projects are kind of neat because I could do a similar thing for the projects but I can open the items actually within the project here so I could say within the project let's say that I'm going to say that we want a drop down and I can add the expense form from within the project and do a similar type of thing and this is going to be going to let's say a vendor for an expense this is going to be 02026 let's say and then this is once again let's say supplies but this time for 2000 it's going to be a billable item but this time it's going to be pulling in to the project as opposed to pulling into the sub customer so similar functionality here project number one we're not going to be using the classes and I'll say save and close and so now if I go back on over to the balance sheet and run it I could still run this report by customer and now it's showing the sub customer and it's showing the project so I could do the same thing and so so I could do the same thing over here on the if I refresh that so there we have that it's doing this it should do the same thing over here notice the project is not being broken out in the same regard with some of the balance sheet accounts so the balance sheet gets a little bit wonky when you go from some of these different options if I go to the income statement and I go down to the projects I want to break this out now I can't break it out by project again I break it out by customer this way and then again it breaks out the project so that's a little so this this is means the projects you can kind of group the projects and the sub customers as similar to each other for these different things so then the and then the classes location tracking and tags as kind of similar so you might want to take these these things and break them further down and those two sub groups sub customers and projects are similar because they're kind of tied to the customer tags classes and location tracking are similar because they're not necessarily tied to a customer but you also have other reports if I was to duplicate this on the projects over and above what you have on the sub customers you have if I go to the reports on the left and say we're going to say projects we've got the project summary report which if I go from 01012612312626 is similar to to kind of like an income statement report but it gives you this kind of quick rundown of the numbers down below let's go ahead and say we we're going to get income on the project like we did last time so if I say we're going to say invoice the project now I'm going to invoice for the project it's pulling in that 2000 just like we saw with the sub customer similar kind of thing there and then down below similar similar thing has happened and here we might have a markup that I might add let's call it add a new item which is going to be a service item let's call it a markup of it's going to go to to this one let's say income account and so let's say we mark it up 500 so 2000 we marked it up 500 so we should have income 2500 so we have some net income save and close so now within the project you've got this nice little income statement income costs if I go into the balance sheet I can break it out by customer still I can't break it out by project you'll note here but I can break it out by customer which sometimes breaks out the project here but it's not perfect on the balance sheet accounts primarily these tools work best on the income statement and then they sometimes on the balance sheet have some balance sheet functionality you notice the sub customer still pulled out the checking account here whereas the project that 2000 got assigned over here so that's kind of an interesting difference but if I go to the to the income statement then it runs it by project so now I've got the amount we build in two separate accounts there's our income minus the expenses broken out by that particular project there's the net income if I look at it in terms of the project summary we've got our project summary here and I have the added reports within the project field so if I go within the project field over here then I've got my transactions here I've got my this is the last I can't see him because I'm in the future so I could say all dates apply so there's our transactions my time activity if and so for tracking time project reports we've got the profitability reports and then we could add time costs by employees and unbuild items the items that we build for that haven't been built yet and so if I do my project summary report here we get a nice report but it's only for one particular project so it's kind of nice to see this other report that's going to give you all your projects in one place which you can do with breaking out by customers although that can get quite cumbersome if you have customers that aren't assigned a project because then you're going to have this long report with a bunch of customers or you can break it out with this project profitability summary but it's a lot more limited limited in in what it has here just has total income and cost and the net profit doesn't break out the categories of income and cost now let's go to the classes so if I go to the classes I have the classes turned on that's by going to the to the cog up top accounting and uh settings and then within the categories I've turned on both the class tracking and the location tracking so this is going to give us a similar breakout so if I if I save that and close this let's look at these same transactions so I'm going to drill down onto these transactions clicking here and then I'm going to drill down onto that 1000 and then I'm going to add a class to it so let's just say I'm just going to make up a generic class and just say it's going to be class number one so this is different than the sub customer this is different than project number one this is now a class which is being assigned by this field over here it's going to the sub customer which is being assigned by this field so we can look at the differences between the two I could save and close that one let's go to the other one this transaction and give it a class so I'm going to assign the class down here I'm going to say this is going to be class number one and so let's say okay save and close and then if I go back to my reports and run the reports so now on the balance sheet I've got it broken out now by customer which gives us our line items by customer I can also then hit the drop down and break it out by classes which breaks it out up top by class now the problem on the balance sheet is some of the accounts might not break out by classes like the checking account if you're doing a line item by line item isn't breaking out by class because primarily the income statement accounts are the ones we typically think of although if you break out some other accounts like a current liability account or something like that you you do have some functionality with the classes being broke out on on the balance sheet on some you know some of the transactions so you have some of it being broke out which can be useful in some scenarios and if you have uh if you have software that's higher level up from pro plus you might have more balance sheet uh balance sheet capabilities but mainly with all of these we're thinking income statement so on the income statement we ran it by customers so you can see it up top those other sub customers and the sub customers and projects give you this sub customer summary but that can have problems because then you can if you have a whole bunch of customers that's and you don't want all of them to have a separate column then then classes could be the way to go because if I sort them by classes then I'm not going to have all of those customers in the way I could just have the class assigned so that obviously is quite useful you know if you're trying to assign by location or by department or something and break out the columns and you don't want like a million different columns of a of a customers that's a lot of customers but you know what I'm talking about you know what I'm not any case so now it breaks out uh it's breaking out this way let's let's go back into this transaction and add a class to it as well so let's say this was class number one and say boom and go into here and just to make it different let's say this was let's say this was class number two just so we could say two classes and say this was class number two save and close and did it not assign that one let's go back to our report CK Pauso all right so now we've got it broken out by classes and I just broke part of that transaction between the two kind of randomly uh so it doesn't line up exactly to what we did with the sub customers but you can do it the same way you can see how you can use classes as a job cost kind of thing and basically assigns your classes as jobs which can be kind of nice to in some ways because then you're not running the report and showing all the all the customers and sub customers that don't have you know it's just going to show the classes and then the total and that total on the right side is quite useful as well because it's taking your entire income statement subcategory line item and breaking it out to a class and if there's not a class assigned to it it'll give you that non-applied area which allows you to drill back into it and assign it to a class if you need to now the location tracking is similar to the class tracking but it doesn't give you that option to break it out line by line so let's add that one let's go back to the first tab and we saw the location tracking is in the same area to turn it on and so let's just add a location let's go into this one again i'm going to drill down and now add a location to the same transaction so we'll go into it and say let's say now we have a location one or let's just say it's like california is one location you don't have to use it for locations by the way but note that it's up here and not assigned to the to each line item so i can't go down here and change like this location of this line item to a different location the location is for the full transaction which is going to include however many line items there are so if i save and close that and we go okay and then let's do the second one and let's say this one is location i'm going to say nevada nevada so now this entire transaction is going to the second location of nevada and it's going to a class one so i'm going to say save and close and then if i go back on over to the balance sheet i can run this and so now it's broken out by class let's hit the drop down and say i want to see it by locations and so now i've got california and nevada so notice it is breaking out the balance sheet account and i think that's because it's assigned to the full transaction whereas when i assigned it to each of those line items then it only picked up the line item activities in other words the checking account wasn't a line item i can assign by line item right but still most of these are kind of focused in on the on the income statement but some of them break out some of the balance sheet accounts which again can be useful it's not perfect on the balance sheet you're going to find you're going to run into some kind of confusing things but having some of the items broke out on the balance sheet is nice if i go to the income statement and i want to see it not by class but by location i can now have this breakout by location here these two that are broken out i can do the same and notice the non-specified items are useful because that allows me just like with the class tracking to go into it and then to change it and make and then assign it to a location california let's say for this one and this one we're going to say uh nevada so we'll say nevada on this one boom save and close and then back and so now if i run it now we've got hold on a sec 010126123126 running it okay there we have it so now we've got these two applied out so similar functionality it's a little bit easier to do the data input if you're saying that you want everything assigned uh per transaction but you don't have as much flexibility uh that way so just note the difference between those two uh the the the class tracking allows you to break out line by line which makes it easier or makes it more flexible because if i go in here and i assign a class line by line i might have one expense account for example that i'm then going to be assigning to multiple different classes so i can use one transaction that applies to multiple different classes i could turn that feature off on class tracking so that every transaction is assigned just one one class per transaction similar to the location tracking that's what's happening with the location tracking up here now note if you wanted to do that and make it easier you still might want to use the class tracking sometimes because the class tracking has more flexibility on the payroll if you're processing payroll sometimes to assign a certain payroll item a class whereas for some reason the location tracking uh seems to be more limited in that regard all right finally we have the tags so the tags if i go back up top and just all right well let's add a tag to a transaction if i go into these transactions and add a tag to it let's say we're gonna go in here and say uh sales rep or something like that and typically you you kind of want to make your tags let's actually go into the tags up top you kind of want to make your tags up top and then say let's go to my tags because they're designed to be in groups so you could say let's go to my tags in the accounting view it's also under banking and then the tags up top and then you're gonna say okay let's say we want a new let's say tag group and let's say we have sales reps california and then i sign a color to it or whatever we'll get into this more later and then i'm going to say i want to add another let's let's say well then you can add your reps within it rep one add and then rep two add and then i'm going to close this out and i'm going to say new tag group i'm going to say sales sales rep nevada make that a different color save it and then sales rep three and sales rep four for example so now you've got your tags that are grouped out kind of in this fashion so then we can assign our tags to transactions so if i go back into my my profit and loss here and i go to my primarily my income statement accounts you would think what the sales reps i'm going to say we have sales i've got uh where are my tags managed tags hold on a second okay i had to refresh my screen there's my sales rep all right so we're gonna assign that one i could assign multiple tags too so that's another one of the benefits it wouldn't in this case it doesn't really make sense to assign two tags but if i had multiple tags maybe they work together on this sale from two different areas i could say save and close this transaction to do it and then okay and let's go back into my balance sheet it's gonna go to my reports and say this was the profit and loss i should say from 010126 to 123126 and let's do the other one i was in here here and i signed tags did i sign tags to this one let's say this one was over here okay so now if i go back into my income statement and run it notice i don't have my drop down by tag or there sometimes it shows up and sometimes it doesn't but there it is right there we got the sales reps we've got the ungrouped tags ungrouped tags and then the sales rep which i know is breaking out by that tag and then i've got the sales reps california now notice what the tags don't do is they they don't give you like the full income statement side by side on the income statement which is kind of nice but they give you that that snippet of the of the profit and loss per tag which is nice if i go to the to the balance sheet let's open up the balance sheet reports you don't have as much flexibility on the balance sheet the tags are kind of on the income statement so if i go from 010126 to 123126 and run this and then if i hit the drop down notice i don't have my tags at all on the balance sheet so you don't have that balance sheet breakout so so there's that now if i go to the to the first tab and i go into my tags area which i usually go to by the cog and then the tags it's also in the banking section and the tags you've got a quick overview up top now note that this is this year so if i say all dates all dates and update it see if i can refresh it well it's not pulling in all dates for my transactions up top but usually if i'm in the same year it gives you a nice little visual up top but then down below you've got your tagged information and sometimes the filtering options are a little bit different if you open up from the reports within the tags so if you're using tags and you want to sort by tags you might not want to go to the profit and loss and then filter by the tags but actually go into this tags area itself and then i can run the reports for the sales reps here sales reps here by group or by each you know individual sales reps so if i go up here and say uh run the report then we've got our our report let's make this from 010126 to 123126 where our data is at and so there's our our income statement and then if i hit the drop down here once again we've got our sorting data sales rep california uh sales rep nevada if i go into the sales rep california then you you would expect you might have filtering options over here so if i filter then this tags another thing that sometimes doesn't show up in the filtering options when you run the normal income statement and i can filter by tags say sales rep one for example and further filter down like that okay so that's the general the general idea so to to recap the overview of this thing all of these tools basically allow you to give another dimension to the to the financial statements primarily focusing in on the profit and loss the performance type of reports so so if i go into the performance reports giving us multiple categories is generally what happens some of these options have more capacity on the balance sheet which includes the the class tracking to some degree and the location tracking it might have more capacity on the balance sheet if you were leveling up from pro plus to uh a level up from pro plus the tags are have so on the profit and loss notice that most of these give you the option to see all of your categories broken out and the total for the time frame you're covering which is nice to run a report like that because then you can tie all your subcategories into the total but the tags generally do not do that so that's it so you want to keep kind of that in mind and when you run these items up top by customer which is typically done with projects or subcustomers then it gets kind of convoluted because you're going to have a bunch of customers even if you don't want to be including those customers whereas the classes and location tracking will show up here you can also possibly filter by the classes by most of these options too so if i hit the filter and drop down i can run a report and then filter by class i can filter by location notice the tags are a little bit more finicky to filter with you have to actually go to the tags reports to filter by the tags so that's kind of a strange thing with the tags uh and then so one of the main differences in terms of cost is that the the projects the location tracking and the classes are in pro plus and above if you go below that and you want to use some of this some of this capability then you might still be able to utilize the subcustomers and the tags although quick book sometimes even limits the kind of reports that you can generate with them so but i think you still have the capacity to run those uh on on the lower versions and when you try to group these together in your mind i would again think of subcustomers and projects as doing a similar kind of thing and then the locations and the classes being quite similar with then the tags being more similar to the locations and the classes then to the subcustomers and the projects another key difference is going to be that the classes allow you to do some processing of the payroll so if i go to the to the cog up top and we if we had if we had our payroll turned on which i turned on over here we'll talk about later but if you go into the payroll settings then you've got this option for your accounting transactions down here and you've got your your class tracking options so here's your class tracking functionality and you can assign like employees the class now that's good and you only have it you don't have that on the location tracking which is kind of strange to me because you would think obviously if you had a full location you would want to be assigning the location to it so sometimes the class tracking has more flexibility than the location tracking we'll talk about maybe some workarounds on that in future presentations however even that is somewhat limited because sometimes if you're if you're assigning jobs or something like that you would like to assign the the payroll you know by what they were doing not so much by the employee so you have to assign by employee now the job the projects has has its own kind of flexibility with the payroll as well so if you go into the projects then you can actually assign the payroll to the projects however to do that properly you have to be entering weekly time sheets so that usually works quite well if your employee that you're assigning is working hourly work and you're assigning your so then you're assigning the cost to the project based on that if you have a salaried employee then you run into a similar problem with payroll and obviously payroll is something that could be done internally or externally so we might dive into the payroll thing in a future presentation so those are some of the big differences so now that we have kind of covered some of those big differences we could ask the question that we might dive into is like okay well given that when might we use you know one tool versus another tool