Create Your Quickbooks Estimate Template for Accounting Effortlessly

Quickbooks estimate template for Accounting

welcome to this quickbooks 2022 tutorial for beginners on how to create an estimate my name is matt holdquist with the quickbooks university first things first hey if this video is helpful please share it please give it a thumbs up and like it and also please subscribe to my channel i can continue bringing these videos as long as my subscriber base continues to increase so i appreciate the subscription also one other thing when you're ready to take it to the next level and have your personal questions answered i know pretty much everybody watching these videos has questions about quickbooks that's why you're watching these videos head over to the quickbooks university at qbuniversity.org when you sign up for the master class i answer your personal questions okay so how to create an estimate first of all let's talk about when you're going to create an estimate now if you're in a retail business or if there's some kind of point of sale gift shop you know something like that you're not going to create estimates you can just skip this video you are going to create estimates generally when you have a job that you need to quote for somebody so that could be a remodel job it could be a landscaping job it could be construction it could be it could be any number of things but it's going to be hey i need to provide a quote for a customer and i need to send it to them so this is a way to do this in quickbooks and then there's some nice features in here that we'll walk through that will help you turn that into an invoice uh purchase order etc okay now that's when you're going to do an estimate in quickbooks it is a non-posting entry so what that means is it's not going to affect your accounting records it will not do anything in here it's not going to record the numbers it is what is called a non-posting entry so you'll have a record of it and you can always go back to that record but it's not going to affect your actual accounting record so like sales and revenue and expenses and things like that okay so here we are at the home screen very simple we've got the flow chart and you can see here that we have this estimates button all right so what you want to do is you want to go ahead and click on this and it's going to bring up a form which is very the very same format for a lot of forms in quickbooks so an invoice purchase order etc they're all going to look like this and they do this to make it simple for you to navigate so the first thing we're going to do is we're going to pick the customer job so if this is a new one you're of course going to add a new customer and if there is a specific job then you're going to create that job under that customer so we're going to pick the job drop down menu here we'll say uh mike block utility shed we'll just assume this is a new one okay so we choose mike and if you are class tracking then you're going to choose a class all right so this is uh we'll say new construction custom estimate is the template of course i've got other videos you can set up your own templates on this we've got the date the estimate number name and address and ship to if there was a separate ship to address okay so that's not entirely necessary all right so for then you're going to go down you're going to choose the items that are included in this estimate all right so when you set up all your different items from the item list you're going to choose so we're going to say okay first of all we need some blueprints and we're going to have one set of blueprints at 150 dollars all right and then we are going to say that we need concrete slab and we'll say one and is this going to be 1500 for this shed all right and then we are going to say framing because we will have framing and this is going to take 20 hours of framing 55 an hour 1100 bucks and if we need to add let's see uh we're gonna need some well we'll just say electrical okay so we're gonna have electrical and we'll say 15 all right so it's gonna be 3 125 to build this utility shed for mike now of course you will have set up your items for taxable non-taxable etc so that will default and pick this from your item list all right so we have our total 31.25 and so the next thing you're going to do is you're going to say okay you know depending on how you're going to send this estimate to mike you're going to either print and mail or you're going to email you can email later okay so we're going to say that we're going to email this later that way if we're doing a couple of different estimates we can always go in and we can email all of them at one time okay so then what we're going to do you just hit save and close and save and new for the time being uh well let me show you this we're going to say save and close all right so we close this now if you need to get back to your estimates of course you can just go to estimates and you can hit the find button or if it was just recent you can just hit this back arrow it's going to take you right to it okay so that's pretty straightforward or what you can do uh if you go to the company menu drop down menu go to the chart of accounts go all the way to the bottom here uh i meant estimates okay so if we go through here we'll see estimates there is our estimate all right so we can double click this and it's going to pull up the estimate now let's say you send the estimate client customer calls back says hey this is great let's go with it so what you want to do when you are ready to you can create a purchase order so if you need to order any of these materials now labor and foundation of course you wouldn't but let's say electrical you need to do a purchase order to the sub you can click this and create a purchase order if you need to create a sales order okay this which is really kind of just like the next step from an estimate to a sales order it means this is a booked sale that you haven't started yet you can do that as well and then if you need to just go and create an invoice you can click create an invoice and you can say create an invoice for the entire estimate 100 you can do it for a percentage okay which is very handy when you are doing maybe a percentage billing so if you're 25 through the project and you're going to build you know 25 percent of it you can do it this way or you can create an invoice for selected items or for different percentages of each item okay so for example if you're going to bill for just the blueprints and the slab and not the other two you can do that here so we'll say we're going to create for 25 of the estimate we're going to click ok and it's going to automatically convert that to an invoice and you can see that it's 25 okay of each of the amounts that we had on there and it'll say 781.25 so then you can email this or print whatever you want to do and send this to the customer okay so it's pretty straightforward create an estimate and it also creates a good trail okay so if uh you know you do estimates in your business and right now you're say do it by hand or in another program get them into quickbooks because it allows you to track everything from start to finish for that particular job any comments any questions please feel free to leave those below and also again head over to the quickbooks university love to see over there that website is qbuniversity.org you