How to Get the QuickBooks Job Cost Reports You Want (1005/Level 3)

How to Get the QuickBooks Job Cost Reports You Want (1005/Level 3)

Diane Gilson: Good Day, this is Diane Gilson with Info Plus Accounting and I’d like to welcome you to today’s session, ‘Accounting System Not Up to Speed?’

Well, if so, we’re going to give you some ideas for planning and coaching your pit crew to victory.

Today what we’re going to be covering is dealing with a situation where you feel like your accounting system isn’t necessarily up to speed.  It’s not where you want it to be.  So:

• Identifying needs and wants is very important in that process.  We’ll talk a bit about that, and about
• Where you should go for some information-gathering and get feedback, as well as
• The prioritization process – and then
• A few little things called timing, accountability, project management, and expectations – managing all of those pieces of a system upgrade.

OK, if your accounting system isn’t up to speed, if it’s not set up to give you some of those kinds of reports that we’ve [previously] looked at – and we’ll have another session on a deep dive into those reports – but I think most of you are used to looking at a profit and loss statement, so I didn’t spend any time with that. But, let’s say that you’re not getting the kinds of reports that you want, so the first thing is to define what’s wrong.

Now, we spent a full hour going through what we call a 35 point check-up. This is what we do with new clients to take a look at what’s going on in the file.  And we included ‘how-to’s’ for you or your people – to actually go in and look at things like a high-level structural check on what’s going on.

• Are your lists set up properly so that you can get the kinds of reports that you want?
• We looked ‘under the hood’ to see if the file preferences are set up right.  There are a lot of background settings that need to be established in a particular way to get QuickBooks to do what you need to have it do.
• In that process, we looked at the status of reconciliations,
• We checked to see whether job costing is being used properly and being balanced.
• Are estimates being used?
• Are budgets being used?  These really great tools in the system – are you using them? – and
• We took a general look for the reasonableness and completeness of the financial results.

So, it’s not an in-depth audit, but it’s certainly enough to get a good feel for what we’re looking at.

The next thing, if your accounting system is not up to speed, and assuming you want to do something about it, how do you get your whole crew working together to get things fixed?  So in addition to that 35 point check-up (because that’s just really a look at the company file and the information), we want to ask questions.  For instance,

• What’s missing that you want?
• What can be eliminated or simplified?
• Is there too much detail showing up that makes it confusing or difficult to extract the information you want?
• Who’s getting what information, and is it useful to them? There’s no point in spending time delivering reports to people who aren’t going to read them or use them, so we want to find out what it is that people need and try to get it to them.

So, [there are] other things you want to look at.  We’ve got a whole checklist here and of course, you’re going to get these hand-outs so you’ll be able to see these things. Questions you might want to ask are things like:

• Where is it taking a lot of extra manual work to get the information that we need?  Can that be streamlined in some way?  Maybe through the use of technology or through reworking how information flows through the system.
  …..
• What’s the state of the technology that you have?  Is it time for newer or better or more efficient ways to gather or process information?  It’s not unusual – as I work with clients – that I see that they’re working in some very antiquated systems where things don’t work the way they’re supposed to and people stand around trying to fix things for huge amounts of time.  Maybe they’re waiting for numbers to crunch, maybe the QuickBooks file is too large and they need to move up into Enterprise.  So they’re spending an extra 2-3 minutes here, 2-3 minutes there, next thing you know it kind of adds up to maybe an hour a day, and if you sit down and compute what that fully burdened cost is, that’s a huge outlay.  And it doesn’t take too long if you’ve got that type of thing going on in the background to cost-justify – not just to make yourself feel better about it but to actually look and say “OK if it’s costing me $3,000 a year to have Susan deal with a bad scanner, am I further ahead buying a $600 scanner that works almost instantly?”  So it’s that constant cost-benefit juggling act that you need to look at.
  …..
  Just as an example, a little story on the side is that, as a member of the Intuit Solution Providers team, we get regular webinars, and they had an expert come in who had actually proven – they did measurements and so on – that by giving their workers 2 computer screens they were picking up between an extra 7-10% of productivity…