QuickBooks Tip: Discover the useful Source Name in QuickBooks Reports

QuickBooks has many hidden goodies that are useful for contractors. I want to teach you all of them.

This time I'm going to try something new: I'm adding QuickBooks screenshots to this post. Let me know in the comments if you find these articles more useful with illustrations.

I'm also working on a free downloadable report on the Top Ten QuickBooks Tips and Tricks for Contractors, and this is one of them.

Many QuickBooks users are confused when they open a report on Job Costs, only to find the Name field is the name of the Customer:Job. As a contractor, you might be more interested in a list of Job Costs for a particular job with Vendor information included.

Here's how I've created a report I use all the time with exactly that information: Job Costs (all except Payroll) listed and totaled by phase/division and with Vendor Name, date, amount, etc.

You start with one of QB's standard reports: Reports > Jobs, Time & Mileage > Job Profitability Detail

QuickBooks prompts you to select the Customer:Job. At this point it doesn't matter, so open the report with whatever name QB offers. I'll have you memorize this report later without the Customer:Job, because you'll want to select the Job when you run the report.

Now double-click on the total at the bottom of the Act. Cost column.

This will bring up a detailed listing of the transactions making up that total. It's this Item Actual Cost Detail report that will give us the starting point for our memorized report.

I want to pause for a minute to point out that many times, as in this case, the useful information you want is buried in the detail of a report. If you double-click on the little magnifying glass with the Z in it (for Zoom) you will drill down, as here, to a more detailed report, and ultimately you can drill down to an individual transaction if you double-click it.

Next you click the Customize Report button at the top left of the report window.

In the next step you'll discover your new best friend, the Source Name, and make some other customizations that will make this report a lot more useful.

In the Columns box in the Modify Report window, click Source Name to check it.

Click Class and Billing Status to add them to the Report, and Qty to remove it.

Finally, scroll down and click Balance to uncheck it.

Now your Report is almost perfect, unless you use QuickBooks for Payroll, as we do, and as I STRONGLY recommend you do (I'll tell you why in another post).

QuickBooks Payroll adds zillions of line items to this report: every chunk of time on every paycheck adds a line for the labor, and a line each for the taxes, etc. paid by the employer. This is great for Job Costing, but not so great for the usability of this report.

You probably bill out your employees at a fixed rate or rates. You don't really need to know line by line what they cost on a particular Job. There are plenty of other reports that will capture labor as part of your Job Costs. I recommend you use the Time by Job Summary and/or Time by Job Detail reports (Reports > Jobs, Time & Mileage) as a companion to the report we are creating in order to capture the Labor by Item detail for a given Job.

To polish up this report, we are going to limit it (“Filter“) to non-payroll cost transactions, change the date range to All, and remove the Filter for the specific Job before we Memorize the report. Finally, I'll show you how to get QB to prompt you to Filter the report before you run it.

To Filter the report,

1. Click the Customize Report button again.
2. This time, select the tab labeled Filters.
3. In the Choose Filter box, click Transaction Type.

Now click the arrow next to All under Transaction Type in the center of the Filters tab. Select Multiple Transaction Types from the drop-down list. Now you'll check the Transaction Types we want to include:

In the pop-up window, click Check, Credit Card, and Bill. Scroll down in the window and click CCard Credit and Bill Credit.

Now your report is a lot more useful; click the image if you want to see a bigger screenshot:

Now this report gives you information you can use. You can use it to eyeball the list of your purchases for the Job so you can make sure nothing has been left out, or billed to the wrong Job.

I almost always run this report when I am getting ready to create a Time and Materials Invoice, because the Source Name field, unfortunately, is not accessible in the process of creating an Invoice.

Let's all petition Intuit (Help > Send Feedback Online > Product Suggestion…) to add it to the Invoicing Items window, and to the Customize Forms process for Invoices.

I'll do some posts on Invoices and Customizing Forms later so you can see how useful it would be to have access to the Source Name there.

In the second part of this post, we'll remove the Job Name filter and set the date range to All before we Memorize the report. Then I'm going to teach you to set your QuickBooks Preferences to prompt you to modify the report before it runs.

The point of removing the Job Name and setting this Preference is that otherwise you would have to memorize the report with the Customer:Job you picked when you first ran the report. Remember that this detail report is extracted from the Job Profitability Detail report, and QuickBooks prompts you to Filter that report by Job before it runs. If you memorize your new report without removing the Job filter, it will always run with the same Job you selected at the start of this process.