Smart Service can send data over to the myriad of job costing features available in QuickBooks, but Smart Service itself cannot perform job costing for you. Smart Service creates job records in QuickBooks Desktop (or Sub-Customers in QuickBooks Online) so you have a convenient place to associate your estimates, sales orders, purchase orders, invoices, timesheet entries, and more in one convenient place for reporting.
Smart Service alone offers profitability reporting, but not job costing. When estimating profitability, Smart Service calculates the difference between the cost of the line items entered on the work order versus the prices entered on the work order. This results in a simple calculation of profit, but does not include the cost of labor, depreciation of assets, or the use of other job materials not accounted for in the job items tab.
What Smart Service will do is help you gather information and send that information to QuickBooks so it can be used for job costing. Smart Service can send the initial estimate, the timecard punches related to the service, and the final invoice for the service over to QuickBooks.
If you haven’t looked into the job costing features for your version of QuickBooks yet, check out the links below.
Next let’s take a look at the options Smart Service has available to help you coordinate your team and send job costing information back to your version of QuickBooks. Each section below details a piece required for the job costing process.
Using Jobs in QuickBooks
Smart Service created jobs (or, “sub customers” if you use QuickBooks Online) so that the rest of the items in this list such as estimates, invoices, purchase orders, and timesheet data can all be associated with the same record in QuickBooks. Since Smart Service automatically provides this feature, you don’t need to do anything to set it up!
Once you’ve completed all dates assigned to a given job in Smart Service, we’ll inactivate that job record in QuickBooks for you. QuickBooks has no problem reporting on inactive records, so you shouldn’t have any issues there.
The invoice you associated with the job record when it was active can still be found by clicking on the parent customer record in QuickBooks as well, but your reports should focus specifically on the job, hence “job” costing!
For those of you using QuickBooks Desktop Pro or Premier, your company may have disabled this function of Smart Service. You can learn more about what else changes when Smart Service stops sending jobs to QuickBooks here.
Sending Smart Service Estimates to QuickBooks
In the Estimates tab within your Settings, you have the option to tell Smart Service to create sales orders and/or estimates in QuickBooks for you when you convert a Smart Service estimate into a Smart Service Work Order. This is a great feature when talking about job costing because with the estimate in QuickBooks we can do an estimate vs. actual comparison later.
These features are available if your version of QuickBooks supports sales orders and/or estimates. Both options are available for QuickBooks Desktop but only estimates will be available for QuickBooks Online.
Adding Item Costs to Smart Service
If your version of QuickBooks supports tracking costs for line items, you can enter default costs when creating those line items in QuickBooks, which can be modified in Smart Service on a per-job basis. Adding your cost (what your company pays) is a great way to increase the accuracy of your job costing reporting in QuickBooks.
When costs are entered as above, Smart Service will calculate the gross profit and gross profit percentage for the job in question. Although costs can be entered in Smart Service for any line item, QuickBooks will only recognize those entered costs for line items that have a cost field associated with them; not all QuickBooks items have a cost field.
Sending Purchase Orders to QuickBooks
Smart Service has the capability to create purchase orders in the office or via iFleet, depending on your permissions. This feature is only available if your version of QuickBooks supports and is configured to use purchase orders.
Purchase orders not only assist with getting parts ordered but also tracking costs when new job materials are purchased. If you’re new to purchase orders with Smart Service, you can review our article on purchase orders here.
Sending Timesheet Data to QuickBooks
We’ve created an article on sending timesheet data over to QuickBooks for billing, costing, and/or payroll which you can view here. Beyond understanding how to track those times in Smart Service and send them to QuickBooks, you’ll want to investigate how your version of QuickBooks attributes labor costs to jobs.
We’ve found a great article for QuickBooks desktop that details the job costing process when it comes to line items here. If you aren’t running payroll through QuickBooks Desktop, you can still perform job costing manually using these features.
For QuickBooks Online users, we are not able to send over payroll items to QuickBooks Online in the same way we do for QuickBooks Desktop. Service items associated with times, however, can be sent into QuickBooks Online and associated with an employee.
Sending Invoices to QuickBooks
If you’re currently using Smart Service, you’re most likely already performing this step daily. Sending the invoice over to QuickBooks, while performing the other steps above, provides all the data you can use for job costing in QuickBooks. If you want a tutorial on the process of invoicing through Smart Service, we have a video on that here!