# Progress Billing with Quick Books?



## Leon Construct

I pretty much have a grasp on quickbooks and its functions. I have the Premier contractors edition 2010 and I use a program called Bid4Build for estimating. Once the estimate gets approved I then have to retype and reconfigure it into quickbooks when time comes to start sending invoices.:bangin:
My biggest problem in my company and projects is being able to properly bill and track progress payments and change orders. Can anybody give me a way to accomodate quickbooks to do this? Currently, I invoice for whatever the progress bill is... The only problem is that its confusing to keep track of what has been paid on a project because it has 4 or 5 different invoices. :wallbash:
I would like to show customer how much has been paid, how much is left, how much we are billing for now, and for what we are billing for vs. what they have paid vs what is left.... Also, fluctuations for change orders. Is this possible in quickbooks, if so how? This is really making business difficult since almost all projects are progress billed. Please help.

Thanks


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## gallerytungsten

You can use statements to show total activity (invoices, payments) for a customer.


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## Greg Di

There is no way to take an invoice for a job, say $90,000.00 total and have Quickbooks spit out three progress invoices (like 1/3, a 1/3, a 1/3). It is a MAJOR shortcoming.

You have to make up separate invoices for each phase. Why they don't have "Job" form is beyond me--especially on a Contractor-based edition. DUH.


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## piercekiltoff

I just found out in QB 2010 premier contractor edition, and possibly other editions, you can Create Statements, and in that dialog box, there's a check box that allows you to print line items/details from each invoice - so you could write up three separate invoices and then print the statement.


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## Greg Di

piercekiltoff said:


> I just found out in QB 2010 premier contractor edition, and possibly other editions, you can Create Statements, and in that dialog box, there's a check box that allows you to print line items/details from each invoice - so you could write up three separate invoices and then print the statement.


Of course you can, but that is more work and completely not accurate to the way contracts are setup.

There is the BIG price of $60,000.00 for the project and three payments due of $20k each. With QB, there is NO way to do this without a workaround.

Completely silly.


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## Mike Finley

Leon Construct said:


> I pretty much have a grasp on quickbooks and its functions. I have the Premier contractors edition 2010 and I use a program called Bid4Build for estimating. Once the estimate gets approved I then have to retype and reconfigure it into quickbooks when time comes to start sending invoices.:bangin:
> My biggest problem in my company and projects is being able to properly bill and track progress payments and change orders. Can anybody give me a way to accomodate quickbooks to do this? Currently, I invoice for whatever the progress bill is... The only problem is that its confusing to keep track of what has been paid on a project because it has 4 or 5 different invoices. :wallbash:
> I would like to show customer how much has been paid, how much is left, how much we are billing for now, and for what we are billing for vs. what they have paid vs what is left.... Also, fluctuations for change orders. Is this possible in quickbooks, if so how? This is really making business difficult since almost all projects are progress billed. Please help.
> 
> Thanks


Do you create all of the invoices at the same time for the entire project or do you create them one at a time.

If you create them all at the same time before the project starts you have recievables now. You can track them a bit easier to see all of them or what is unpaid. If you have a change order you can create an additional inovice or add it as a line item to an existing invoice.

As for showing the customer what's paid, what' left. It would be nice, but I'm sure it's not that important. Don't you have a contract that shows the payments? They can keep track by themselves. It's not really that important to keep customers informed of the fiancial aspects of the job other than when the next payment is due right?

However, if you really want to do this, open up quck books and click on help and then do a search for "statements" you have to decide whether you want to use invoices or statements with your customers, sounds like you want to use statements using the customer statement registry.



> If you bill periodically, billing statements may serve your needs. When you use billing statements, you generally do not write invoices. Instead, you keep a record of each customer's charges in a special register called the customer register. When it's time to send out statements, QuickBooks prints the statements by using the entries in the customer registers.
> See also


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## kevins9999

It's actually pretty easy to track progress payments and change orders in Quickbooks. This assumes you have Quickbooks Premiere Contractor edition (all of the premiere editions are the same, you just have to select the contractor option during setup.)

Here's the process:

First, click on Edit/Preferences, then click on Jobs & Estimates, then click the "company preferences" tab. Make sure you've selected "yes" to progress invoicing," and "yes" to using estimates, then UNCHECK "Don't print items that have zero amounts." (I'll explain later.)

1.) Make your estimate in Bid4Build as you would normally do. If you are tracking individual items in quickbooks (for example, framing material; framing labor; etc.) then there is a slightly more complicated version of this next step. I am going to assume you aren't doing that, but if you are let me know and I can walk you through that process. Take the total price of your contract and create an ESTIMATE (not an invoice) in quickbooks. There is a default "construction income" account in quickbooks that you can use to capture all of your income from the job.

2.) To do progress billing you simply open the estimate, then click the "invoices" button at the top of the form. A window will pop up with 3 options: Create invoice for entire estimate, create invoice for a different percentage of each item, or create invoice for a percentage of the entire invoice. If you only have one item then click "create invoice for percentage of entire invoice."

3.) You'll get a new window asking for the percentage you wish to bill. If it's 20%, enter 20 in the window.

4.) An invoice for 20% of the estimate will be created. Send that to the customer. When payment arrives, apply it against that invoice.

5.) If you would like to track the progress of the estimate you can open the estimate, then click the "history" button at the top of the form. This will show you all of the payments that are applied to that estimate and the outstanding balance of the estimate.

The nice thing about this system is that you can create a change order at any time during the process. It doesn't matter if you've billed part (or even all) of the estimate already. Here's how:

1.) Open the estimate

2.) Add a new line item for the change order (for example, Upgrade doors per agreement). Add an amount for the item.

3.) Save the estimate.

4.) When it's time to bill you will go back to step 1, except this time you can either bill for the entire estimate (which includes the change orders) or PARTS of the estimate. By selecting PARTS of the estimate you can bill for any line item individually, so if you are billing for just the change order then you can enter "0" for the original contract price and the percentage of the change order(s) that you are billing for. Quickbooks tracks everything together under the history tab.

To get the progress payment percentage information to the client you need to enable that on the INVOICE. 

Open the invoice, then click the "customize" button at the top. If you're in QB 2010 or greater select the bottom blue button when the little screen pops up. Click the "Prog Cols" tab, the click the tick box for Prior Amount, Prior %, Curr % and Total %. You can click the tab under "print" only, since you don't really need to see this on the screen.

When you print the estimate you'll have the prior percentages and amounts along with the current amount. It's easy for the client to figure out what they've paid.

Since you're printing items with zero values on the estimate your client will see that they've fully paid for an item or if they haven't yet paid for an item every time you send an invoice. If zero values were not printing the it would hide these items as you are not billing for them on this particular invoice.


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## Tonkadad

Thanks for taking the time to type it out.


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## Leon Construct

Great explanation...I posted nthis a couple months ago and thought I would receive emails when it got a response. Just like a Contractor to not read the fine print...lol... Anyways, thanks to all that replied...Great info!!!:thumbup:


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