Projects feature in QuickBooks Online

I attended a training session this morning with Intuit Quickbooks Online. For those unfamiliar, Quickbooks online is a cloud based computer package that competes with MYOB and Xero in the accounting engine space. Should you wish to google it, QBO plus was specifically the item being looked at today.

The exciting feature that we were doing a deep dive on was the projects feature. In this feature, you are able to establish a hierarchy for your business. In plain english, this means that you can categorize the drivers of profit in your business to report by class or by location or by both. The ability to use the drivers together or independently without additional subscription fees was very attractive.

The depth of tracking can be illustrated by the following example:

If a trucking business was using this feature, they could easily run a report to track the profit on a truck by truck basis, on a trucking division basis or both over one site or many sites. Where this could be useful would be in working out the utilization of the truck, the gross margin efficiency of running the truck per day and the efficiency of the trucking enterprise both locally and interstate. This depth of reporting would provide for management just about everything they would want to see from a management perspective.

Similarly, on the expense side, you can charge expenses plus a margin to be added to an invoice and can track time sheets of employees into jobs and push into payroll to prevent duplication of time and effort in bookkeeping to provide numbers that might actually make sense.

Next, you were able to progress bill in projects at various milestone stages of completion and compare budget against actual results to match your quoting with your actual performance.

Along with a reasonable inventory process which will handle stock warnings for reordering, purchase orders, and basic categorization that goes to four levels I think the product looks very promising. That is not to say it is a one stop shop if you have a warehouse and assembly line, but for more basic inventory needs and included in base subscription costing I recommend business have a look at it at the very least to manage one of the spiralling costs to small business, being the compliant cloud based accounting engine information technology infrastructure of the business.

Take a look, or ask your accountant next time your bookwork is giving you the irrits.