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Quickbooks estimate template for Product Management

(gentle piano music) - [Kaylin] Hi everybody, this is Kaylin Leland from Fourlane over here. We are doing our webinar today about creating a construction bid. Okay. So everyone should be able to see my screen. I have a nice little slide deck. We are going to be creating a construction bid in our webinar today. So a little bit about four-lane. We have four uniques here. We are value added in sellers for QuickBooks, NetSuite, Xero, and Acumatica. Okay? We are also experts in accounting and the software so it makes this a little bit unique. Not only are we that software expert but we have that accounting background as well. In addition to that, we are ERP consultants, okay? We like to dispel them that that you are outgrowing QuickBooks, but we will be on bias and right fitting you in your correct software. We are also strategic partners for change management. We like to empower your team and make sure that we are getting the most out of our software and using everything as efficiently as possible. So today we will be covering a couple of different topics. Preferences, nope, go back. Preferences for estimates, templates for estimates items for estimates, creation of it and then of course the exchange order. Just a quick recap for everyone who is attending the series the QuickBooks Enterprise Future Courses. Next week we'll be covering the MEC package the balance sheet, reconciliation prepayments on inventory, and customer deposits. If you would like to learn any other topic please feel free to email us. We would love to get that on the list. Just a quick thing marjorieapp.com is the email address and we are going to go ahead and get started up. Right now I have just a demo QuickBook file. So the first thing I would like to go through is the settings, okay? Because as many of us don't, if our settings are not correct for the file, nothing else will be correct. So if we were come down here to preference there's a couple of different things that we would want to look at. Under jobs and estimates, we would want to have our do you create an estimate on. I also put progress invoicing on because I do like you know, to see that and walk through it. I also, in this example, I did put, if you come down here to the time and expenses, do you track time? Yes. And I want to mark them as billable. This is for this example. I would like to walk through expenses and labor as well. Of course, every single all everyone's different company will have different needs. Nice, okay. Right now that we have our preferences turned on for it we would want to add it to our templates. We want to have these options of adding construction bids to our templates which is going to be so exciting and awesome. So if I come down here to my estimate I have this custom estimate right here. I am going to go ahead and click on additional customization. And of course here in the templates you can customize anything on the templates, headers, footers. Really what I'm going to focus on today is on the columns I want to show the markup column. So we have our cost that we are incurring ourselves. We have the cost of payment that we are sending to the customer. And the markup you will see on this even though I am showing the markup on the screen I'm not printing it, okay? So the customer doesn't know the markup, okay? That is pretty important. We don't want to share that information with our customers but we might want to sh to have it and be able to adjust those markups or those pieces on our own screens for our own financial information. So we have the settings, we have our templates. The next thing that we're going to want to look at is our items. So right here I brought up labor. Okay, just for labor item, you will see that I have made this item what's called a double-sided item. So I clicked on this box that says the service is used in assembly or performed by a subcontractor. So therefore I can have an expense account and an income account, I have a cost for this item. And then of course the sales price and you can see the markup or your margin, right? Right next to it. I've also for machine parts, okay so inventory parts inherently would have a cost cost of good sold. And then of course our income. I'd just like to make sure that all of these pieces are filled out. And of course, while we're creating our estimate we can make any adjustments as necessary. Okay? So if I come up to here to our customers let's go ahead and create our first estimate. We're going to do, in this example an estimate for Trees Unlimited, right? We're going to have the 'cause the template custom estimate because as you see over here from our markup column we can see that here. So what we want to do is put in some labor we're going to have some labor and some parts, okay? Note that as soon as that clicks on labor and parts, right we do have our rates, our markups and our totals right here. And then of course down at the bottom we have subtotal markup and then actual total, these pieces, and I keep saying about this markup column, it's so important to make sure that we have our margins when we are estimating for jobs So we have our margins, we have what our intention is going to be, and that ultimately we want to have job costing at the end of it to make sure didn't we meet our margin, right? Did we estimate properly? So one of the things I really like about this construction estimate this construction billing, is you're not only looking at what can you charge the customer, but you're also looking at what is it going to cost you, right? It's making you look at the whole thing all at once. So let's fill this out a little bit more in labor. Let's say we have 10 hours at $10 an hour and we have 15 different machine parts, okay? Another thing about this markup column is you can change the base price. Let's say instead of 150% markup we want it to be 200% markup, okay? It will adjust our amount going to the clinic. So you can sit here and you can change your markups for whatever this labor these machine parts are going to cost you to make sure that your margins are whatever dollar amount you would like them to be, right? And then of course, you know ultimately charge the customer. But these fields you can change you can adjust in QuickBooks, we'll do the math for it. In the markup column in addition to the percentages, you can put a whole dollar amount. So if you don't want it to be say 200% but you're like, "Hey, I really want to make $50." We can put a whole dollar amount in here and QuickBooks will do the math and any adjustments we would like to do, okay? Another thing I want to show you is now that we have our initial estimate, right? It goes to the customer. The customer proves that they really want to work with us they're excited about it but they want to add on some things, okay? If we come back here to say labor and add another five hours we go ahead and save this estimate this box shows up, add a change order, okay? So change orders are very interesting because we are still keeping the original 10 hours of labor on the invoice that is still flowing through to our reports. But this is the same job and we don't have to create a brand new estimate for any change order orders. We can just add it to the order. So if I go ahead and add this change order the labor now shows up the additional five hours at $10 and then we have all of our fresh numbers everything's updated, it will even update all the way through to the reports, but it will track for you. There's this change order line here on this date. You added five hours which costs the customer this much money, okay? So now you have a record of any changes anything that the customers do request and want for you. Again, this becomes very helpful. It goes all the way through the system for our job costing for things like that. But we're not creating multiple estimates not creating multiple transactions for this same job. We can look at this one transaction and see the job all the way through. That's very important. Alright, so we're going to go ahead and save this. Now we have our estimate, the big things about job costing and estimates is really just making sure that your costs are what you expect them to be. So what I'd like to do next just to kind of complete the circle let's go ahead and let's just enter a piece of time. So we're going to do is we're going to create click on that same job that we had. The service item is labor, okay? To be able to go against the estimate for trees unlimited, right? We have to have the same service items as is on the estimate. So I want to put say four hours of labor I'm going to unmark it billable, right? Because we already have it on the estimate. I don't want to create an additional line for these invoices for these pieces but I do want to have the costing piece go against that job. Now, if you remember from our lists in right from here our labor is $10 for each hour. So if I'm to run a job costing report, okay let's do it for this month. We have our labor, Nope I was playing with the system before. So we have our two estimates, right? Our original 10 and then our change order of five hours. We have our actual cost, our quantity of five hours which is coming from our time sheets. Now we can have our costs our difference in our estimate versus actuals. And then of course we haven't done any revenue for that piece yet. But this bidding, I want to be kind of closed the loop. The bidding in these exam on these estimates for the contractors is so important to make sure that we have our profit margins. Another very good report that I like the job whip summary, okay? Just a quick overview. We have estimates versus actuals are percentage complete, right? And then our revenue, I have done a webinar in the past about over under billing. So these estimates become so important because it is the basis for all of this. Okay? And then of course we have our estimates versus actual summary and detail and then our committed costs by job. So committed costs, just for those of us who don't know and don't use the system maybe every day. Committed costs are payroll costs that are incurred and not yet paid out. Committed costs are not yet actual costs. They will become actual costs when we do go ahead and pay that payroll. So back on our estimates, right? We have our labor of $10, or sorry 10 hours of labor, right? We have incurred our time card for labor but we have not yet paid. So it will sit in that committed cost column until it's actually paid. When it's actually paid, just like as if you pay a bill then will move from that committed cost column to that actual column, okay? But it will be in the system under this cost for labor that we have identified on our items list. So why is construction estimating so important besides getting your costing rate? We can play with our margins. I have a client who in the construction business in the plumbing business, and they do estimates all the time for multiple year contracts. Most of their contracts are about 18 months which do go over two different tax years. And they spend so much time making sure that their estimate is proper making sure that estimate and their margin is correct. Because over 18 months your materials change. You have to account for labor and then any labor increases, raises, bonuses, things like that. You have to look at it all the time. One of the things that they do too is they have this they have a contract and they bid the project about 18 months each time. About a million, million and a half dollars each one. So they have a lot of these items, right? A lot of items, a lot of different rates a lot of markups and everything else. And it is so important and they were so excited when I showed them how to do change orders on the same estimate instead of creating what they were doing before was creating an estimate each time they had a change order but when they did have a change order it's about 15 different lines, okay? That became a big issue when this estimate became an invoice. Because how do they know what they're invoicing for? So their invoices, they would have to send the customer multiple different invoices or copy paste all onto one. Because if you have four different estimates and you are invoicing your customer a piece from each one QuickBooks does not automatically put it on one invoice. So it's a big deal when we introduce them to the change order feature because now from this estimate I can come up here and create an invoice. Oh, I have an overdue balance on this account. Let me remove that real quick. By the way, we can ask QuickBooks to, under your sales and customers, to not sell to overdue customers. And let me turn that off from when I come here and I create an invoice based on the estimate it gives me a couple different options. You could create an invoice for the entire estimate for a percentage or for the different items. So this customer that I'm talking about they invoice for a percentage of the entire estimate. So let's say we're going to invoice for 10%. If they, when they didn't use the change order feature before they knew about it, they would have to send instead of four or five different invoices for four or five different estimates. So now on this invoice that goes on it has the original pieces, right? It has the change order, it acknowledges the change order and it's adding that 10% invoice across the entire thing. That became a very big key to them for the for keeping track of what was done for the ease of the client. So they could see all of their pieces in in one invoice instead of multiple, it became a big thing. Okay, let me assign a location. I also want to show, I'm going to show it on the invoice and then go back to the estimate for a second. If I print preview this invoice, not everything that shows up on this screen is client facing. So if you have contracts, you might have different types of things that you would like the customer to see. So right now I have just a demo company, right? And billing to Trees Unlimited. I show the estimated amount, the quantity, the rate, and the percentage that I'm billing them. It has the original up here and then the change order all of that is currently visible to the client. But in your templates you can pick and choose what is visible to the client. So now that I've invoiced this customer, let me go back to my estimate since we are talking about estimates today. If I come here, right remember our estimate has our markup and our costs on it. We might not want the customer to see that. If I come here to print preview our estimate, of course we can add the item line if we would like to but right now I only have the quantity and the rate. So the customers do not have to see your internal costing and your internal markup. But we do encourage it for the reason of creating an accurate estimate in making sure that these projects do have good margins. That's important. We would like to track it. And then of course, any change order, any pieces does flow through to those reports on the other hand. Okay, but it is really important to look at these screens have all of these pieces up, but we don't have to show them. Okay, as a quick review for that, if we were to come back to the templates and customize our templates on our columns we have our quantities, our rates, we can have our amounts, our markup. But there is this column right here that says print as long as this is unclicked, customers won't see it, right? But it will make sure that our math our margins and everything is correct and as accurate as possible for us bidding the project. Which is the basis of why we do business. So also we can have click the print screen on many of these different forms and QuickBooks. It really just comes back to what do you want to see on the screen? What do you want to calculate and have the system run through but we don't have to have it print to those customers. Okay. All right, we are coming towards the end of our time. I just wanted to give another quick pause if anyone else has any questions. No. Okay. Well, hey, that is great. Thank you everyone for being such a great audience. As a quick recap, our next webinar is about the month end close process and then reconciling the balance sheet. So if we do have any questions if we do have any topics that you would like us as a company to go over, please email them in. We would love to hear from you. Okay, thank you. (gentle piano music)