On the other hand, if your company never does more than one job per customer, or you do not want to track individual jobs, you don’t have to enter job names. For example, Doug’s printing company refers to each customer order as a “job.” However, even though Doug gets repeat business from customers, all he cares about is whether the customer has paid, so he doesn’t need to set up jobs for his customers. Besides using projects for jobs, you can be creative. For example: ■
If you manage several apartment buildings, set up the building addresses as customers and the individual apartments as jobs.
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If you invoice against purchase orders, set up each purchase order number as a job.
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If you have a practice or organization that sends one statement to a family to cover individual members of the family, set up the family members as jobs.
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If you have multiple estimates per customer, search the help index for “estimates, by job”.
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QuickBooks reports about jobs apply to customers as well. You don’t have to set up jobs in order to use these reports. For example, the profit and loss by job report actually applies to both customers and jobs. If you have customers but not jobs, you will still see information about your customers.
Changing the opening balance for a customer or job When you first set up a customer or job, you have a chance to enter the opening (unpaid) balance for the customer or job as of a specific date. The date should be your QuickBooks start date (that is, the date when you enter opening balances for all accounts, customers, and vendors). When you enter the customer’s opening balance (in the EasyStep Interview or New Customer window), QuickBooks creates an invoice for the amount and date you specify. This invoice is probably the first transaction in the customer register. (There should not be any opening balance transaction if the customer had no unpaid balance as of the start date.) You can change the customer’s opening balance invoice by finding it in the customer’s register and then editing it. If you failed to enter an opening balance but want to create one now, enter an invoice dated on or before your start date. To summarize the amount owed as of your start date, enter on the invoice an item set up as a nontaxable other charge, and assign the account Uncategorized Income.
To learn about…
Search the Help index for…
Displaying a customer’s register
customers, registers for
Editing a transaction in a register
registers, editing entries
Entering an invoice
invoices, creating
Setting up an other charge type of item
other charge items
Should I track customers and jobs?
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