You buy services from contractors or employees. You sell these services to your customers.
QuickBooks Online (QBO) has some features that can help you with this process. The Plus version of QBO includes some time tracking features that can simplify the entry and sale of the services you provide.
The Plus subscription allows for up to five users. In addition you can create two accountant users, without paying for additional subscriptions. You can add users with report viewing only rights. And you can have an unlimited number of time tracking users.
To see how this works, let’s setup a fictional example. We’ll use our sample company Rock Castle Construction. Rock Castle provides certain services to its customers. Some of those services are performed by employees, some by subcontractors.
All this time must be tracked so Rock Castle can pay for it and invoice its customer. To ease the burden of tracking the time, we’ll let those who provide the service track the time for us.
First, we’ll set up a new user in QBO.
From Settings (gear icon), choose Manage Users. Then elect to Add a new user.
Remember, if we select Time Tracking as our user type, we can add as many as we want without incurring additional cost.
We can choose a name from either our vendor or employee list. In this case, we will choose a vendor, Mendoza Mechanical.
As we proceed through the setup, QBO will ask for the users name and email address. We enter the information and continue.
QBO will invite the user to setup an account.
Above is a portion of the email sent to Mendoza Mechanical inviting them to setup their user account in Rock Castle’s QBO subscription. A link exists to accept the invitation. It also gives Mendoza instructions for signing in as they need to enter time.
Above is the very simple screen presented to Mendoza so they can setup their user account login credentials.
Once the one-step setup is complete, Mendoza is able to access the time activity portion of Rock Castle’s QBO subscription and enter time.
Above is a screenshot of Mendoza Mechanical’s access to Rock Castle Constructions QBO subscription. Note that the other menu items do not exist in this window. There is nowhere else in the software this user can go.
Shown is the single activity time entry screen. A weekly timesheet could also be used. Mendoza identifies what customer they worked for and what service was performed. They can enter time as a total amount, or opt to include start and end times.
There is also a help popup window to answer questions they might have about this entry.
Once the time is entered, Rock Castle can pay Mendoza and invoice their customer. All without getting the time information from Mendoza on paper or in an email and then entering it themselves.
Hector Garcia, CPA
Certified Advanced QuickBooks ProAdvisor
7791 NW 46th St. Suite 109
Doral, FL 33166
954-414-1524
hector@garciacpa.com
