How to Do Job Costing in QuickBooks?

Each individual expense and revenue item must be given a job number before the job costing process can be completed in QuickBooks Online. You must update the settings on your customer list, products, and services, and then submit estimates and invoices to your customers to begin using QuickBooks’ job costing functionality.

A business accounting term known as “job costing” refers to the tracking of costs and revenues by “job” and the uniform reporting of profitability by the job. It is a tool for keeping track of the precise costs of labor, supplies, and overhead associated with individual jobs and using that data to determine whether costs can be decreased in subsequent jobs.

Features of Job Costing

Every small business needs to be able to bid competitively to keep a healthy profit margin. Businesses can generate job-specific financial reports, track expenses and income carefully, and refine estimates to increase profitability thanks to proper job costing.

Although using job costing in QuickBooks may seem like a difficult task, the advantages are crucial for keeping a successful small business running.

• Keep track of your expenditures. You can keep a close eye on how much money you’ve spent on a job by using QuickBooks’ proper job costing. To make sure that every job is being completed at cost, using QuickBooks gives you a thorough way to keep track of every receipt, invoice, and payment. 
• View the revenue generated by each job. In addition to keeping track of expenditures, job costing in QuickBooks shows you the final profit for each job. When a job is finished, you can see not only how much money you spent, but also how much money you made and how closely your actual costs adhered to your original estimate. 
• Identify the level of a job You can identify the jobs that are most lucrative and advantageous for your company using the data and reports that QuickBooks can produce. You’ll have the knowledge you need to make informed decisions about which jobs you should accept and which you should reject thanks to this. 
• You can compare your estimated costs to your actual costs after the job is finished thanks to job costing in QuickBooks. This comparison will demonstrate whether your estimates are accurate or whether your bid is too high or too low. Your ability to estimate will increase if you pay close attention to job costing.

Steps to do Job Costing in QuickBooks

Budgets aren’t included in the Simple Start or Essentials levels of QuickBooks Online, so you’ll need one of those before you can start keeping track of expenses.

Step 1: Track Customer Expenses

• You must first modify your preference for expense tracking in the Company Settings before you can track expenses by customer. On your QuickBooks Online screen, click “Company Name” or the gear icon in the top right corner, followed by “Company Settings.” Check the box next to “Custom transaction numbers” by selecting the Sales form content in the menu under the “Sales” tab. For receiving partial purchase orders and progress billing, we will require this: 
• Next, let QuickBooks Online know that you want to track expenses by customer. This can be done by selecting “Bills and expenses” from the “Expenses” tab on the Settings screen. The following three boxes need to be checked: “Make expenses and items billable,” “Show Items table on expense and purchase forms,” and “Track expenses by customer.” When you’re finished making your changes, don’t forget to click “Save.”

Step 2: Modify Your Customer List’s Settings

• Setting up your customer list’s settings is the next step. We’ll be using sub-customers, or what QuickBooks desktop users refer to as Jobs, and selecting the “Bill with Parent” option in the customer preferences:

Step 3: Modify the settings for the goods and services

• You must inform QBO that you buy each of your Products and Services from a vendor in order to use them for job costing (Products and Services are referred to as the Item List in QuickBooks Desktop editions). Not all the items on this list must be set up in this manner; only those that you hire a contractor to complete or any merchandise you buy to sell are exempt.

Step 4: Submit estimates and bills

• Create an estimate, get your customer to approve it, and then turn that estimate into an invoice is the typical workflow. The simplest way to create an estimate is to use the “Quick Create” button, which is the name given by QuickBooks to the plus sign that can be seen on any screen of QuickBooks Online.
• Fill out the “Estimate” form with the necessary information, hit “Save,” and then send it to your client.
• You’ll be able to convert to an invoice once the customer has approved the estimate. We suggest getting the signed estimate approval and any engagement agreements signed, scanned, and attached to the estimate using the “attach documents” feature.

What is a Job Costing

The costs of overhead, labour, and materials for a particular job are added up as part of job costing. This strategy is a great tool for tracking costs to specific jobs and looking at them to see if the costs can be decreased in subsequent jobs. Checking to see if any extra costs incurred can be charged to a customer is an alternative use. Costs are accumulated at the small-unit level using job costing. For instance, job costing is suitable for determining the cost of creating a unique machine, designing a piece of software, erecting a structure, or producing a small quantity of goods.

How Should I Use a Job Costing System?

Job costing produces discrete “buckets” of data about each job that the cost accountant can examine to determine whether it really should be assigned to that job. There is a good chance that costs will be incorrectly allocated if there are many jobs actively being worked on, but the job costing system’s very nature makes it highly auditable.

If costs are to be covered by customers, job costing necessitates a high level of costing accuracy. 

• Types of business that uses Job Costing
• Key features of Job Costing
• Key components of Job Costing
• Example of Job Costing