Create Efficient QuickBooks Estimate Template for Businesses

Quickbooks estimate template for businesses

[Music] simon says subscribe and click on the bell icon to receive notifications welcome back to quickbooks desktop 2022 this is cindy and we are working through module 4 where we're going through and talking about setting up customers and jobs we're going to start talking a little bit about estimating jobs in the next couple of videos if you do not create estimates as part of your business then skip on down to video number nine and go ahead and look through invoicing customers for products and services we're going to go ahead now though and start talking a little bit about creating estimates this is part one make sure you watch both parts so that you get a full understanding of how estimates work let's flip over to quickbooks and we'll start talking about estimating jobs quickbooks offers the ability to create estimates or quotes so that you can turn those quotes into invoices to get paid from your customer you can actually do what they call progress invoicing meaning that you invoice your customer for certain items that are on that estimate until everything is pulled over on your home screen you're going to see the estimate icon right here if by chance you don't see it it's probably because you told it when you set up the company file that you do not create estimates let me refresh your memory on how to turn that back on if you go up to edit on the menu come down to preferences make sure on the left you're clicked on jobs and estimates and then the company preferences tab here's where you turn on the option to create estimates remember if you're creating estimates you probably do want progress invoicing as well make sure this one says yes and then go ahead and click ok now you should see your estimate icon appear if you do not use estimates and you want to leave this icon here it doesn't hurt a thing you would just start with the create invoices if you invoice in your business something else just to know is estimates and purchase orders are on the same line here and that's because they're both considered non-posting if you create estimates for a potential customer and you never hear back from them it doesn't really affect your books you'd have to actually run special estimate reports to even see that estimate let's go ahead and start the process i'll show you how this works let's go ahead and click on estimates the first thing you want to do is choose your customer and your job if you're working with the job feature always always always click the job underneath your customer that you're wanting to work with if you just choose the customer name you're going to run reports and see other and you won't know which job those transactions go to make sure you click on the customer and the job the next thing you'll want to do is choose the class if you're using the class feature if you're going to use the class feature use it consistently because it doesn't do you any good to use it sometimes and not others reports won't be accurate i'm going to choose remodel in this case there are also different templates you could use when it comes to estimates invoices any of your forms if you look over in module 10 that's where you're going to see how to actually customize these different templates we'll just use the one that it pulls up automatically in this case the next thing you want to look at is the date it's going to pull in the current date but you can change that date if you need to and also notice the estimate number any transaction that's numbered in quickbooks whether it's a check or an invoice or an estimate it's going to start with number one you probably want to start off by changing that number and then it will number sequentially after that for you unless you change it again you'll see here it pulled in the name and address of your customer and if you happen to be shipping items somewhere then you'll want to choose a ship to address over here if you don't have one you can add it if you don't need this field at all just leave that blank let's go look down in the body of the estimate if you notice there's a column that says item and if you click right underneath it a down arrow appears this will give you a list of all the different items you have set up in quickbooks items are things that you sell to your customers sometimes you purchase items as well items are set up by different types you'll see that some of these items are services you provide you'll see some of these are actual parts physical parts there's inventory and there's non-inventory you're going to have different categories that items can fall into we're going to be looking at these in a later module but for now we're just going to use a couple that are on the list to show you how this works i want to start with framing you'll notice once i click framing it pulls in a description and you can type over that you can add to this this will word wrap so you've got plenty of space to type in the description if you need a lengthy one i'm going to go over to the quantity field and i'm going to put in 10 and you'll notice that it calculated my 10 times the cost of 55. this 55 was set up when the item was set up you can type over that if you want to change it this one time only you'll notice that it calculated the quantity times the cost to give me an amount in this column now we skipped over the unit of measurement you'll see it's grayed out right here if you have something you sell by the foot the yard that by the case possibly you could set that up as a unit of measurement and choose one case one yard we don't have that set up in this example that's why it's grayed out let's take a minute and talk about the markup column you have the ability to mark up an item a dollar amount or a percentage i'm going to say 30 percent in this case you have to put the percent sign or it won't do the percentages then if you tab through it you'll notice that it calculated that for you to give you a total the last column says tax that means that for sales tax purposes framing is a labor and this is a non-taxable item let's go put in one more we'll do a physical part this time let me scroll down and find some wood doors we're going to choose exterior wood door and i want to add two of these we'll just use the cost that it brings in i want to point out the markup in this case the reason that this markup pulled in automatically and it's a negative number is because when you're setting up an item you can tell quickbooks on average how much you pay for it and on average how much you sell it for if those two are set up it will pull in a markup for you we obviously don't want that one we'll just delete it and we'll put in a dollar amount in this case i'll just say a thousand dollars and notice it did the calculation for me this is a taxable item because it's a physical product that we're selling our customer you could keep going down the list and add as many items as you want this line here is not the very bottom you it will keep going as long as you keep adding items let's take a look at a few things at the bottom of the screen on the left side you'll see there's an area for customer message there are some that are pre-set up but if you want to add your own you would click add new and add one right below that is a field for a memo just something quick you might want to say that the customer won't see and this also tells me the customer is taxable as far as sales tax is concerned on the right hand side you can see it gives me the subtotal the total of the markup if there were sales tax it has the sales tax rate pulled in and you see that amount and then there's a total at the very bottom that gives you a general idea of how to set up the body of the estimate what i want to do now is head on over to part two and we're gonna go up and look at some of these options that you see on your icon bars up here and a few of these different tabs we'll be looking through some of the reports and things like that so let's head over to part two and i'll see you shortly hey there welcome back to quickbooks desktop 2022. this is cindy we just completed estimates part one where we were able to set up an estimate for a potential customer let's go ahead now and finish talking about some of the other options available for estimates this is part two let's flip over to quickbooks and we'll keep going in part one we actually created an estimate for a customer and i'd like to go back to that estimate since i'm on the home screen the easiest way to do that is to go back to the customer center right here and look at the transactions for my customer we were using tom allen and you can see that here is tom allen's estimate all i have to do is double click and go right to it now that we have the estimate created what i'd like to do is go over some of the options with you and we'll go to the top of your screen and go through these four tabs starting with the main tab here you'll see the first thing you can do is use the find feature that quickbooks has to find an estimate you could use the arrows that go left or right to go to the next or previous estimate keep in mind that every transaction in quickbooks is set up in date order that means that if you had previously entered an estimate and maybe you backdated it a few days it may not be the previous one when you hit this arrow and you have to keep clicking on it if you can't find it that way you can click on this find option right here and this will allow you to put in some criteria you can see that you can put in a customer and job name a date beginning and end date here an estimate number and an amount and you can fill in all or any of this information you like and then have it fine for you and that would generally find that estimate the other option i want to mention is this advanced option right here you can go in and put in any of this criteria under this filter column that you see in search that way we are going to look at the whole search option a little bit later let's go ahead and close out of this i just want you to know that advanced option was there the next option you see here says new and this will allow you to create a new blank estimate this is the exact same thing as going to the bottom of your screen and clicking on save and new that you see down here the next option over says save if you're working on this and you want to save what you've done so far you can hit that save option notice there's a down arrow there that will also let you save this as a pdf file if you'd like to do that here's where you would delete this estimate if you'd like you can also create a copy that's handy if you need to create another one exactly like this and maybe just make one or two changes saves you a lot of work we're also going to be looking at memorizing transactions in a later module but this would allow you to basically tell quickbooks that every month as an example i would like to see the same estimate in quickbooks you can also mark a transaction as inactive now what happens is if you have a transaction that's inactive it will still be in quickbooks but it's not counted as any of your numbers when you run reports if you ran an estimate report for example it wouldn't be counted in those totals the next option you see is the option to print this you've got a couple things you can do you can preview this which we're going to do in a second you can also just print the estimate right here you can print an envelope which will do a mail merge with microsoft word and you can also save this as a pdf let's start with the preview option i'm going to just click anywhere in the middle and that will zoom in and i wanted you to take a peek at what your estimates will currently look like because you will want to customize this you can see it's very plain it has your company name and address at the top you may want to add a logo your telephone number the website email address you can do that by using one of the templates that's available to customize in quickbooks and we're going to do that in a later module you'll see here's the date of the estimate the estimate number here's where it automatically puts the job name notice they call it project that would be something else you may want to customize the big things i wanted you to notice here is that when you have an estimate the customer does not see the name of your item they also don't see the markup column now you could turn those on if you wanted the customer to see those but generally you don't want them to so quickbooks doesn't turn them on automatically you'll notice at the bottom you can see the subtotal and the sales tax and the total of the estimate as well and again those are some things you can customize i'm going to close out of that here at the top the next thing i want to point out is the email option you have the option to email this to your customer if you had several that you had set up that you wanted to email you would make sure this little check box where it says email later is checked and then you can email the batch notice you can also attach a file to this this could be a word document or something you've scanned in notice you can also create an invoice from here chances are you will not be in this screen when you want to create an invoice but you can do that from here and just to mention the start project there are several different add-on packages you can buy for quickbooks in two it does make a project management type software and this is where you can go and get a day free trial if you'd like it's called maven link and that way you can manage the project the expenses anything related to it let's look at the formatting tab i mentioned a few moments ago that you could customize this template for this estimate this is where you would be doing some of that and like i said we're going to look at that in a later module here's where you can run your spell check you can also insert a line whichever line you happen to be clicked on if you insert a line notice you insert one above the one you're clicked on if you're clicked on a line you can also delete that entire line or you can copy the line you're clicked on and here's some more customization options we'll look at in a later module now let's talk about the send slash ship option i mentioned earlier that quickbooks can do mail merges with microsoft word you can merge envelopes letters and this is where you would work with those options we will work with those in a later module as well and then let's look at the reports for a moment there are a couple of generic reports already set up for you that are related to estimates you can see you can run an estimate by job if you'd like if you want to see an estimate versus actual you can do that and then you can also see an item price list i also want to point out the transaction history which you have none right now but if you'd already created an invoice based on this estimate maybe received a payment that would create a history you could go look at and sometimes that's very helpful to narrow down where to find certain transactions typically the main tab is where you're going to be working so i'll just click back on that and that's how estimates work in quickbooks i'm going to go ahead and save and close at the bottom and if you've made any changes to your transaction it will ask you if you'd like to save them just go ahead and say yes now that you know how to create estimates in quickbooks let's head over to the next video and we're going to start talking about how to create invoices based on those estimates that you've already created this video is part of our full quick books 2022 course to take a look at the course click over there if you're not a subscriber click down below to subscribe so you get notified about similar videos we upload and to see more quickbooks 2022 videos click over there