Question: The Job Progress form allows me to enter actual job costs and labor hours, but I can also enter actual costs in the Enter Purchases form and the Enter Labor Hours form. What's the difference? When should I use each?

Answer: You must use the Enter Purchases and the Enter Labor Hours forms when you are using QuickBooks integration.

The Job Progress entry form will not allow you to enter job cost information if you have selected the "Copy Purchases to QB" option in the QuickBooks Integration Setup form. See the QuickBooks data integration topic for more information.

And, the Job Progress entry form will not allow you to enter actual labor hours if you have selected the "Create Time Sheets in QB" option in the QuickBooks Integration Setup form. See the QuickBooks data integration topic for more information.

If you are not using QuickBooks integration, then you can enter actual job costs and labor hours in either the Job Progress entry form or the Purchase Entry and Labor Hours entry forms. The only consideration is which way is easier...

• If you have only one employee, then it is easier to enter labor hours in the Job Progress form. If you have more than one employee, then it is easier to enter labor hours in the Enter Labor Hours form.

  If you have more than one employee, in order to enter labor costs in the job progress entry form, you would have to to total the labor hours from all employees working on a particular job item before you can enter the labor hours for each item. The program does that for you automatically when you enter labor hours in the labor hours entry form.

• If you have only one non-labor cost transaction (purchase) per job item, then it is easier to enter non labor costs in the Job Progress form. If you have more than one purchase per job item, then it is easier to enter non labor costs (purchases) in the Enter Purchases form.

  If you have more than one purchase per job item, or if you have purchases that were not in the estimate, you would have to manually go through vendor invoices and purchase receipts, figure out which ones apply to which job items, and total them up in order to enter non labor costs in the job progress form. It is much easier to enter purchase transactions in the purchase entry form and let the program agregate and apply costs to job items.

  Also, by entering all job costs in the purchase entry and labor hours entry forms, this allows you to print a detailed audit listing of all job costs in the Transaction Audit report, or the Estimated vs Actual report.

To summarize, the only situation in which it will be easier to enter your item costs and labor hours in the Job Progress form is in the following combination of circumstances:

• You are not using QuickBooks integration.
• You never have more than one employee working any job item.
• You never have more than one purchase associated with any job item.
• You never purchase any items that are not included in the original estimate.

Considering this rather restrictive set of requirements, it would make sense to only enter your item costs and labor hours in the Purchase entry and Labor Hours entry forms.

On the other hand, if your accounting methods are not as exacting as they might be, the Job Progress entry form allows you to do a pretty good job of "quick and dirty" job cost tracking.

Regardless of how you enter job costs, you must use the Job Progress entry form to update the actual job schedule, and the completion status of each job item.

Note: If you enter job costs in the Enter Purchases form, these will appear in the item totals in the Job Progress form, and the item cost fields will be disabled. And if you enter labor hours in the Enter Labor Hours form, the labor costs will appear in the labor totals in the job progress entry form and the labor cost fields will be disabled.