[Hidden-tech] QuickBooks help needed

[Randolph Ames]

 Christian - Coming from many years of experience as a contractor/engineer
using many forms of Quickbooks, the software is far from perfect for
contractors. The accrual accounting isn't a problem, pretty basic stuff and
any one with some QuickBooks experience should be able to support you with
that. But the project costing is not clean at best. QB does allow you to
create estimates for you projects fairly easy enough. But one of the largest
issues that I continue to have in the Electrical field is the weekly cost
fluctuations in my materials. This also includes yearly price increases from
vendors.

What I am driving at is the poor job that QB does to allow you to update
your material pricing. If you have 5000 items in your item list, how do you
keep on top of that? And most vendors have their own purchasing quoting
system that doesn't link at all to QB. After fighting with this for the
better part of 10 years (must be a slow learner) I have removed all
purchased items from QB and am now using something as simple as Excel to do
my quoting and project costing.

You might want to take a trial version of the "contractor" edition for a
spin. This may help you out. As well as look at the Intuit website
http://www.quickbooksgroup.com/index.html for the QuickBooks community.
There is loads of information available to help you get what you need out of
QB and to mold it to what you want. There is also a ton of 3rd party
software that work directly with QB too, i.e., project mgmt, time cards,
billing, etc.

The bottom line I have concluded is that QB is great accounting software,
but lousy project management software.

As far as timesheets, QB does have a pretty good weekly timesheet that you
can bill directly against projects.

Let me know if I can be of more help.

Regards - Randy

Randolph J. Ames
Owner
Ames Electrical Consulting
7 Randall Wood Dr.
Montague MA 01351
PH (413) 863-2286
FX (413) 863-3005
www.ameselectrical.com



-----Original Message-----
From: hidden-discuss-bounces at lists.hidden-tech.net
[mailto:hidden-discuss-bounces at lists.hidden-tech.net] On Behalf Of Christian
Lagier
Sent: Friday, November 10, 2006 12:31 PM
To: Hidden-discuss at lists.hidden-tech.net
Subject: [Hidden-tech] QuickBooks help needed

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Can any of you help me with a QuickBooks challenge, or, do you know somebody
else that might fit the bill?

I'm looking for somebody that can help me set up QuickBooks Pro for accrual
accounting and project costing. The latter includes finding a way of
reflecting timesheets in QuickBooks. This is for a contractor business, so
any such experience would be a plus.

If you have experience using QuickBooks for project costing, or know
somebody that does, I'd appreciate hearing from you.

Christian
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