QuickBooks 2011: The Missing Manual

Invoicing for Billable Time and Costs

When you work on a time-and-materials contract, you charge the customer for labor costs plus job expenses. Cost-plus contracts are similar except that you charge a fee on top of the job costs. Contracts like these are both low-risk and low-reward—in effect, you’re earning an hourly wage for the time you work. For these types of contracts, it’s critical that you capture all the expenses associated with the job or you’ll lose some of the profit that the contract offers.

QuickBooks helps you get those billable items into your invoices. You have to tell the program about every hour you worked and every expense you incurred for a customer or job. But once you enter those things into QuickBooks, it’s easy to build an invoice that captures them. You can add billable time and costs to an invoice whenever the Create Invoices window is open. And when you open the Create Invoices window in QuickBooks Pro or Premier, it reminds you about outstanding billable time and costs. QuickBooks Premier also has a separate command specifically for creating invoices for billable time and costs. The following sections tell you how to perform all these tasks.

Setting Up Invoicing for Time and Costs

In some industries, like consulting and law, invoicing for time and expenses is the norm. But before you can pop your billable time and expenses into your QuickBooks invoices, you first need to record them as billable items and assign them to the correct customer or job. Here ...