Quicken For Contractors
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Introduction | Table of Contents | Back Cover

Introduction

Quicken is truly a good fit for the construction office. If you are a contractor, builder, or remodeler, you have much to gain by using this software tool to help manage your business finances. But Quicken has been created for generic financial use, which means you have to customize it to reflect the business practices commonly used in the construction field. That's why we've written this book and provided the accompanying diskette-to give construction professionals like you the tools to tailor Quicken to your special needs.

Why You Should Buy This Book

Buying this book signals your ongoing commitment to improve the management and operation of your construction business.

Unless you're a contractor or builder who has the good fortune of being the only game in town, you're forced to cleat with the realities of surviving and prospering in a competitive marketplace. Tougher quality standards and a smarter buying public place ever-increasing demands on builders and contractors. It is this competition that determines the price at which your product or services will sell, not you. You do, however, have a great deal of control over what it costs to produce and deliver your product or services. Controlling your costs through informed and intelligent decision-making is the key to maintaining profitability and protecting your investment.

The most important tool you can use to control your project costs is an efficient job-costing system. Job costing provides a way to track and report on the actual costs of a construction project as it progresses. It also allows you to compare your actual costs with your estimated costs. The basis of an efficient job-costing system is a well-designed, accurate, computerized estimating program coupled with financial management software that is properly fitted to your business.

This book is a working model for setting up such a system using Quicken. It is written to help you get up and running quickly, and to provide you with the vital controls that can make the difference between success and failure in your construction business. We've made every effort to present this material in a straightforward and easily understood manner, without using the usual ledgerspeak and technobabble.

You don't have to spend a great deal of time doing your bookkeeping; you just have to spend the time well. This book will show you how. You'll learn how to set up the program correctly so that you can easily get meaningful information from your reports. For example, we'll show you how to set up jobs, job divisions (the specific phases of a job, such as concrete, framing, or site wiring), and job budgets (estimates). Then we'll give you step-by-step instructions on how to print a report that gives you the estimated versus actual costs for each job, broken down by job division, if needed. With this kind of help you'll soon have control over your financial matters without spending your life at the computer.

Quicken in Construction

Why use Quicken? We believe it offers the best combination of power and simplicity available today for the small-volume builder or general contractor. The importance of simplicity cannot be overstated.

What is Quicken? It's an entry-level financial management software program for Windows and Macintosh computers. Quicken is a registered trademark of Intuit. It's a good alternative to the mystery and complexity of traditional accounting software. Instead of using technical accounting jargon, Quicken uses terms that you're familiar with. Its format is user-friendly and straightforward. It allows you to work in a way that is comfortable, familiar, and understandable. Using Quicken to capture and calculate all your daily transactions, including checks and deposits, is much faster than entering and calculating everything by hand. Quicken can summarize your transactions, presenting them in reports and graphs that give you a good idea of where you stand financially. You can record your assets (equipment, cash-in-bank, vehicles) and liabilities (truck and construction loans, payroll taxes), as well as track income, job costs, and overhead expenses. Quicken gives you quick access to critical business information that you never thought possible.

What Can I Expect to Learn from This Book?

We've written this book because we've watched builders struggle with their bookkeeping and accounting systems. Even though Quicken was written to be easy to use and understand, the complexities of construction accounting make this book necessary. If you follow the setup procedures we've laid out in this book, you can expect your bookkeeping and accounting systems to give you back information that will make your business more productive with less effort.

By following along with this book, you'll learn:

• How to set up easily manageable cash-basis categories and accounts in Quicken.
• How to create, edit, and use classes. (In Quicken, a new job or project is set up as a class.)
• How to set up a simple and effective job-costing system.
• How to create and use budgets.
• How to create and interpret reports that are designed to keep you in touch with the vital signs of your business.
• How to process payroll.
• How to prepare interim financial statements when required by a tender or new supplier to determine your creditworthiness.
• Tips and tricks for getting the most out of Quicken.

If you're willing to make a small but regular, disciplined investment of time and effort to understand and apply the techniques and methods covered in this book, you'll see measurable and continuing improvement in your accounting skills. In addition, you'll gain the personal and financial rewards that come from working not just harder, but smarter.

Karen Mitchell has 15 years experience as a general contractor and finance consultant. Her company, Online Accounting, helps construction companies around the world computerize their accounting using Quicken and QuickBooks. Ms. Mitchell has an extensive background in construction accounting, frequently publishes articles on computerized business management in leading construction publications, and, with Craig Savage, co-authored the popular book Construction Forms & Contracts.

Craig Savage has been a general building contractor for over 25 years, and now does consulting as a specialist in computer solutions for construction companies, helping builders move beyond "shoebox or dashboard" accounting to more organized and accurate systems using Quicken or QuickBooks Pro. His concepts of bookkeeping and job costing are easy to understand and implement, and his step-by-step explanations make setup and reporting simple. He has written numerous articles for construction magazines, edits two newsletters, and is associate editor for the Journal of Light Construction. He is a regular speaker at builder-oriented conventions and conducts seminars dealing with construction management. He is the author of Rim Carpentry Techniques and co-author of Construction Forms & Contracts.

Jim Erwin is a partner in several second-generation family-owned construction companies in upstate New York involved in land development, residential construction, and light commercial construction. He is an active member of the National Association of Home Builders and has written articles on the use of computers in construction for a variety of construction magazines. Mr. Erwin is also the creator of GC/Works, a full-featured software solution for the construction industry that uses Quicken or QuickBooks Pro as its basis.

Rex Underwood is a general contractor, designer, programmer, and journalist with 20 years experience in the construction industry. He is the owner of the Rex Underwood Design Group in Santa Barbara, California, specializing in high-end custom residential and light commercial construction. Rex is a writer and associate editor of the Macintosh Construction Forum, Construction Business Computing, and Rural Builder Magazine, whose articles have enjoyed a readership of over 400,000 people worldwide. His speaking engagements, as well as his programming efforts, focus on construction office software integration and automation.

Introduction | Table of Contents | Back Cover