Quickbooks & AIA

Norge

I am going to organize the office of an existing Construction Management & General Contractor business. Please let me know if I am on track with the following assumptions:

1. Use Quickbooks Pro Contractor 2008 to do the accounting for the Office & Field expenses that affect the business taxes.

2. Use Quickbooks to track all jobs that are done as GC, where the funds filter through the business and affect taxes.

3. For Construction Management jobs, don't track the job through Quickbooks because it doesn't affect the business taxes. Instead, use Quickbooks for the % income & office activities, and use AIA Forms to keep track of the job, request payments, etc.

I haven't used Quickbooks Contractor version, but am I right in assuming that Quickbooks is for taxes, and no matter what bells & whistles it has, if it is a Management project you shouldn't use Quickbooks to track the money and job activities that don't go through your bank account?

The company currently uses an accountant to do all of the taxes and AIA to track all jobs - no Quickbooks or electronic accounting software.

Giovanni

Norge, I think you are on the right track. One way to capture the job costing data from your CM projects without running the money through your company books is to create another QuickBooks company file that is just used for the projects you don't use your own money on. That way you could create estimates, issue POs, receive and pay bills, and track your actuals vs. estimates, etc for those jobs and not effect your company bookkeeping.

Set up properly, QuickBooks will not just track your taxes, it will help you run and track your projects too. So I would have one QB file that is named for your company and a second one named something like CM Projects. You can export your vendor, customer and item lists from one to the other so setting up the 2nd company file goes pretty quickly.

If all you are getting out of QuickBooks is tax tracking, you're missing 80% of the benefits of the program.

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Giovanni

Sarah9910

Why would you NOT track the CM jobs thru QuickBooks? If it's because when you write they checks they are from the owners bank account, you can set up a checking account called "Job ### Clearing account" and deposit the money from the owner into that account. Don't you need to know when the subs were paid? I would think you would want the reports generated from these costs.

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Sarah Keiser, Business Consultant for Contractors
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