Shall I use the QuickBooks Online project or use a sub-customer?
Instead of having a job feature like QuickBooks Desktop, QuickBooks Online uses projects and sub-customers. Are they the same?
Let’s start with the job. How do we use the job in QuickBooks Desktop accounting software?
Assuming ABC Company awarded you two jobs: JB123 and JB456. From the customer listing, you first add ABC Company as a customer (the debtor), then highlight ABC Company and add a new job with the job name JB123. The job will appear underneath the primary customer name. For example:
ABC Company
JB123
JB456
Once created, you can use the job when creating an invoice or link the job to an expense when entering a bill or payment to the supplier. QuickBooks will pull out all the income and expenses related to the job when you print a profit and loss by job report.
QuickBooks Online does not have a job feature; instead, you use the project feature to track the awarded jobs. The function is similar.
Once you have invoiced the project or linked it to the appropriate expenses, you can find the transactions in the project navigator. It gives the management an easy-to-understand graphical view of the project income and costs and a summary of the project profitability. The projects are listed, and the user can filter the project by status (such as not started, in progress, completed, or cancelled), project name, or project end date.
The QuickBooks Online sub-customer
If you use the job feature in QuickBooks Desktop for customers with branches, set up a sub-customer in QuickBooks Online. When creating a sub-customer in the customer list, tick the ‘is a sub-customer’ checkbox and select the primary customer before you save the contact. The sub-customer will be grouped under the primary customer name when you issue an invoice or link the sub-customer to an expense. From the customer list, you see:
ABC Company
Branch 1
Branch 2
Projects for the sub-customer
The advantage of having both project and sub-customers is that you can use them together for a customer. For example, you may have multiple projects with various faculties or departments of a University. You create the University as a primary customer (e.g., ABC University). Then, add the faculties or departments of the University as a sub-customer of ABC University. Do not tick the “Bill parent customer” checkbox if you wish to separate the statement for each faculty or department. Next, go to the project navigator and add projects to the respective faculty. You could have a structure of:
ABC University
Faculty 01
Project F01 A
Project F01 B
Faculty 02
Project F02 A
Faculty 03
Project F03 A
Project F03 B
Project F03 C
In addition to project profit and loss, you can view the total profit or loss by faculty and ABC University by having both sub-customer and project.
How about a shared project?
The project profile only has a customer field, which you link to a customer or sub-customer. You must create two projects instead and assign them to two customers. For example, a law firm may have a case involving multiple clients, so you must allocate the cost equally (or by percentage) and invoice them separately. Let’s say you have two clients: ABC Pte Ltd and DEF Pte Ltd. Both shared a case, CA12345.
First, create the client in QuickBooks Online as a customer. Next, add the two projects (i.e. the case number). The first project name could be CA12345-ABC and linked to your client, ABC Pte Ltd, then the other CA12345-DEF for DEF Pte Ltd. You add a company abbreviation, ABC and DEF, behind the project name. Having the project name in front instead of the customer abbreviation facilitates searching for the project name when creating an invoice. You enter ‘CA12345’ in the customer field, and both projects will be listed in the drop-down field for you to decide which one to use.
Filter both projects if you wish to print a profit and loss for the entire project. In addition to projects and sub-customers, QuickBooks Online has valuable features such as classes, locations, and tags for tracking revenue and costs and monitoring profitability. Contact us or book a demo to learn more about QuickBooks Online.