Contractor woes!

[cptnjarhead]

Hello.
We are a small electrical business trying to keep track of open jobs. In quickbooks Premier you can only see if the job is completed or not and what the ballance is. We need to keep track of Time and materials so that we can go back to that job and look at our status. I would like to be able to make custom reports. Need help.

Thanks.

[suzannemead]

If you create an invoice for the job and mark if "pending" it will not post as a sale. If you are entering that job on your timeshhet and bills that information will show up on a list when you click on the "time/costs button on the invoice screen. You can also pull up a Job Profitability Detail Report that will show this information.

[cptnjarhead]

Thankyou for your response.
I will give it a try. How do I mark an invoice as "pending"?
Thank you again.

[suzannemead]

When on the invoice screen go to "edit" - about 1/2 way down the list click on Mark Invoice Pending. This also will put that invoice on a list of pending invoices. I have an icon I set up so I can access the pending list easily. When you are ready to finalize & send the invoice you go to edit and click on Mark Invoice as Final. This seems to fill the void between estimates & invoices. The list gives you the info. to see what is pending or in progress. When you finalize the invoice make sure you change the date. I have also created a form labeled "Approved Job Work Order" that I use on the pending invoice screen & print it out for our work crews. When the job is complete I just change the date & the form to a regular invoice to send the customer.

[cptnjarhead]

Thank you.
That just might work for us.
I am curious about your Icon to see pending list. I know how to add icons to the menu bar. How do i set it to show pending jobs. ?
Thanks Again.

[suzannemead]

Under reports - Sales>Pending Sales. When on that screen for the report create the icon.

[cptnjarhead]

Thank you.
I will see if that will work for us.
Thank you for all you help.

[cptnjarhead]

That works Great!
Thank you.
P.S. Is their any way to adjust the item description colum in the invoice imput screen to have the descriptions be alphabetical instead of the partnumbers?

[suzannemead]

Not sure I follow.

[cptnjarhead]

When your making an invoice to bill out or pending you need to imput quantity and a item such as labor or a part number. We are an Electrical company so we bill time and materials. Our parts and descriptons are in the quickbooks item list so when we type in a part number we can click the down arrow to scroll threw our part numbers. The problem is the pulldown list has the part numbers in alphabetical order and we would like to have our descriptons be in alphabetical order. their are so many part numbers we use the descriptions to find what we need.
Thanks

[suzannemead]

"The problem is the pulldown list has the part numbers in alphabetical order and we would like to have our descriptons be in alphabetical order". I must be dense today, but I don't understand how your parts numbers can be in alphabetical order rather than numerical order. If you are saying you want to be able to sort the "description" area alphbetically, that can't be done. Sorry if I'm not understanding.

[cptnjarhead]

Sorry about that. You see when i say part number here is an example SQHOM150A... which means (Home line 150 amp Breaker). That descripton is what we are looking for because we dont know all the part numbers so those descriptions are vital to us for finding what we need for the invoice. I have been opening the item list in a different window to view items by descriptions in alphabetical order but that takes an extra step. I hope this explains my question better.
Thank you.

[suzannemead]

I don't know of any way to do this. A thought-probably stupid - Could you change the part number to start off with a description. That way it will pull up. Probably not practical?? I do this with some of my items - enter a descriptive word as the item.

[cptnjarhead]

Well that would work except we have over 1,000 part numbers and growing. I was thinking if we alphabetized our excel doc with
descriptions instead of part numbers they would be intergreated into QB in that order. The problem is i am not sure how to change the order of our descriptions in one cell or row and have the part numbers still coincide with each other.

[suzannemead]

Truthfully, I haven't a clue. Sorry I can't help.

[cptnjarhead]

Well i figured out that it doesnt matter how your excel doc is formatted the default pulldown for descriptions in your item list is alphabetical starting from the first left colum (in the invoice Screen). Their is no way change this even if you make a custom invoice. I can sort the Item list by description in the Item list screen but not on an invoice. Maybe i should post in another forum and see if anyone else has this kind of issue

Thanks

[gibbo]

The only way to change the Item name outside QuickBooks and get it back in so it doesn't create new items is to use the xml-based software developer's kit (meaning you need a programmer). With it you could change the items names in Excel and do an "Item Modification" to alter the numbers to more descriptive names. It is not a simple task, but it is possible.