QuickBooks provides a very useful way to record time for employees or vendors. The weekly timesheet allows hours to be recorded and used for invoicing, while creating the expense in such a way that it can be traced to a specific job or project.
If your business depends upon employee hours to accomplish jobs or projects, or if you use employee hours in order to determine a customer invoice, this feature deserves your attention.
If an icon labeled “Enter Time” does not appear on your Home Page in the Employee section, you must turn on the preference. Navigate to Edit | Preferences | Time & Expenses | Company Preferences. Answer yes to the question “Do you track time?”Now the time tracking features will work in your QuickBooks company file.
Here is a screenshot of the weekly timesheet.
1 Weekly Timesheet
One entire timesheet is devoted to each employee. The one pictured is for Gregg O. Schneider.
The jobs on which Gregg worked show in the left-hand column. The service item, that is the service he was providing to that customer or job is selected in column 2.
Gregg’s pay item, his normal hourly pay item, overtime pay item, or perhaps some other pay type will be recorded in column 3.
You can see the hours recorded on the days of the week, on a row that corresponds to a customer or job on which Greg worked that day. Many jobs or customers can be used, a different row for each, and Greg’s time can be divided between several, even for one day.
How Does This Benefit Greg’s Employer?
Let’s look at how time recorded in this way can be used in QuickBooks. Following is a report of time in this sample company QuickBooks file.
2 Time Report
As mentioned, this can be used for vendors too and it is easy to see who has recorded time in the system. The weekly timesheet hours show on the report in the highlighted area. When these hours are drawn into an invoice for the customer, the Unbilled designation will change to Billed.
3 Tracking Expense and Income from Time
Job reports record the expense of Greg’s time and also the income it produces when invoiced, on job reports. The highlighted section shows the cost of Greg’s, and others’ time on this job. Moreover, it tells this QuickBooks user the cost for the installation portion of the job and the resulting income.
While adding rich features to track the costs of jobs and projects, this way of recording time also saves manual entry effort. As mentioned, the time, once entered, can be carried automatically into an invoice. It can also be used to pay employees without additional entry.
4 Pay Employees Window
The above screenshot of the Pay Employees window shows the time for Gregg Schneider. This pulled directly from the weekly timesheet show in Figure 1 of this post.
If you would like to track costs by job or project, or would like to enter time once and then both invoice the customer and pay the employee without additional entry, try using the weekly timesheet.
Hector Garcia CPA
Advanced Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor
