
M.A. in Accounting & Financial Management
17 years of small business experience
Are you a Construction Contractor or Builder?
QuickBooks Online (Plus) can do almost everything the desktop Contractor's Edition did. It can give you a Profit & Loss Report by customer/job, track billable expenses, purchase orders, customer deposits, retainage, loans and lines of credit. It has invoices and estimates, can track materials by item, and show materials purchased by job. You can enter a simple budget for each job and run a budget vs. actuals report. It can keep track of your payables if you buy on credit and split payments between jobs. If you are a builder, it can track escrow accounts, asset values, liabilities with different terms, depreciation, amortization, and interest accruals.
It does lack true progress billing and change orders. But you can always copy, renumber, and change an estimate, or create multiple invoices from an estimate. This sort or work-around is good enough for smaller businesses on a budget. QuickBooks (even the desktop version) wasn't really meant to run the front-end of a construction business. You may need another way to handle things like scheduling, change orders, true progress invoicing, bids from subcontractors, and notes about customer interactions.
Many of you are happy doing this by hand or with Excel. But there is good online software designed for construction management. The best of these programs can send accounting data to QuickBooks Online complete with job costing. I strongly recommend checking out a solution such as Buildertrend or Knowify. They offer training and support, and I can help manage the interface. It’s all about Professionalism; good front-end software makes a good impression on your clients.

