Painting Estimate in Quickbooks Online Plus - How To Video

Hi, I'm Daniel from BookkeepingForPainters.com, and this video is about how to do a painting estimate in QuickBooks Online Plus. Alright, so the goal of this video is to save you time by creating a process that is a simple and seamless process for doing estimates and invoicing clients on the go, and also setting up a system so that you can really get some good insights into your business through financial reporting using QuickBooks Online Plus. So I'm gonna review the steps in creating an invoice in QuickBooks Online Plus. So these are the basic steps. If you haven't watched the video about how to actually set up your QuickBooks Online Plus account for your painting business, if you haven't watched that video yet, I'll put a link in the description. Definitely look at that video before you watch this one. So first step is to basically verify the products and services section of your QBO Plus, which I reviewed in that last video. You want to look at your, your form style for your estimate and your invoices to make sure it fits your needs. And then for actually doing the estimate, you want to create a sub-customer first, which allows you to do job costing. and then you enter— will enter in your estimate data, and then you actually send it to the customer. All right, so let's go ahead and get started with Accent Painting. So as I said, the first thing you want to do is to verify your products and services. So you go to the gear icon, click on products and services. And this is, in this company, this is who I, this is, I have one service line which is exterior painting. You can add more service lines, you can add interior painting, whatever the case may be for your specific business. So I've already verified this, this is good to go. The next thing that you want to do is look at, under the gear icon, look at custom form styles. And double-click here. And this is how you can actually customize the form styles. There's a few things you want to take a look at. You can obviously adjust the appearance and add your logos and everything. The thing that I'm going to point out is presentation to the client. There's some things you might not want the client to see, specifically the quantity, like the number of hours that you estimated for the paint job or the number of gallons of paint. And the rate that you're charging the customer. And as I noted in a previous video, you'll have to include your markup in the— your labor and your material cost that you put on the estimate. So a lot of painting contractors don't feel comfortable giving the specific rates, so definitely make sure that these are not checked for quantity and rate. That's the big thing for the form styles. And another thing, description, you may or may not want this description, which you'll see, this will make more sense in a second when I open up the estimate, but I go ahead and uncheck it because that includes it on my markup. Formula. So I, I unchecked description as well. All right, so I'm going to close out of this. So we verified our products and services, we verified our custom form styles. Now we need to go ahead and look at our customer. So right now we only have one customer, his name is Al Pacino, and he has two properties. One property, 800 Windsor, we've actually already done an estimate and it's been invoiced, so we're good to go on this. And then we have another property, 125 West Street. So as you'll notice, there's an indentation under Al Pacino. So in QuickBooks Online, in order to do job costing, you actually have to do something called subcustomers. So these two items here are subcustomers of Al Pacino, and this allows us to track the costs and the income per job, which is important to see how profitable your jobs are. So I'm going to open up 125 West Street and just kind of— so this is the checkmark, you actually need to make sure you click— select this property as a subcustomer of Al Pacino. And then you'd also want to do bill with parent, because you're not going to bill the property. In most cases, you want to bill the actual customer. All right, so that is the subcustomer information here. So the next thing we're going to look at is actually creating the estimate. And we'll go ahead and open up this estimate that I've already created for 125 West Street. So the client asks you to do an estimate for them. The first thing you would do is create the sub-customer for the actual client. For Al Pacino, we create— we already created the 125 West Street, and we make sure we select it on the estimate. and that will auto-populate a lot of the details that you see here on the top portion. The next thing you want to do, if you have your location tracking on, which I showed you in a previous video, you wanna make sure you select the location. This, this is really important. You can't forget, there's no automatic prompting for this. If you don't, QuickBooks Online will automatically select your previous estimate, what location was that. So you have to remember to select your location. Alright, and then we also talked about class, which is in this column here. I have residential and commercial, so I've made sure to put residential as the class for this job. Now, specifically going to the estimate details. So when you do your estimate, you know, you'll do your walk around, you'll determine how many employee hours it will take to paint the house, you'll determine how many gallons of paint it will take to actually paint the house, determine if it needs pressure washing, maybe you'll need to rent a pressure washer. So all those details you're going to go ahead and enter into the estimate on QuickBooks Online. Now a lot of that, of what I just described, should be captured in your products and services page, which is really important that you set that up correctly, which I went over in a previous video. But the first thing I have selected here is employee labor. So these are your employees. This is a description of the markup. So $7.25 is what you pay out per hour. And then you include your markup, dividing by 0.4 to get your hourly rate for employees, which includes your markup of $43.12. So for this job, we are estimating 20 employee hours to complete the job at a rate of $43.12, and that is the total amount. So something to know, I mentioned when we're reviewing the custom form styles These two columns right here, we selected that these are not seen by the customer, which I'll show you again here. Something to keep in mind. Now we have equipment rental. So for this job, we've determined we need a pressure washer for a half-day rental, and that's the rate. So we have that added here, and we also have painting materials. So the way that— a technique you can use when you're setting up your products and services is put materials, because for most painting contractors, most of the expenses coming from— for the job is coming from the paint that you're purchasing. So a way you can do it is once you determine how many gallons of paint, you know, you set your rate in your products and services service line page and we have a rate of $100 per gallon and that includes markup and it also includes the miscellaneous costs that are associated with painting like caulking, glazing, drop cloths, and the like. So this all adds up to your totals. Now I have a discount percent here. This is, I mentioned before, a common sales technique is to actually, you know, say, tell the client that if you sign up today you get 10% off. Obviously that's up to you on how you want to use that percent, that discount, but that is there for your use. And then you get your estimate total. So that's a completed estimate. And the next thing you want to do is, you know, you would do this ideally, most painting contractors do this on the job site, maybe after a walk around with the client, you go to your car, get your tablet or your phone out, type this estimate up, and then you can actually send— you can send an email directly to the client. Might want to verify that they have access and everything, but— so you click Save and Send, and this is what the client will actually receive. And we made some custom form styles, form style changes, so that they don't see the amount of hours and the amounts the rate per hour and everything. They just see basically labor, equipment rental, and materials, and that all adds up for them so they know how much it's going to— it will cost them to— for you to paint their house. All right, so you could send and close this. I'm not going to send it, but that would actually shoot off right to their email. And from there, you know, you would do your sales process and try to close the contract and everything. Now once you have your estimate, it's been accepted by the client, the client reviews the estimate, they're good to go with it, something that you can do is click this button here, it's called Copy to Invoice. And this is something I went over in a previous video when you're setting up your QuickBooks Online, is to ensure that this functionality in company settings is turned on so that you can copy straight to an invoice. And you would do this basically to receive the deposit. So, see, it copies it right over, have an invoice. All the data is carried over into an invoice. And here you would just do, you know, however, whatever percentage you do, or maybe you just require that the customer covers the materials. So, you know, a deposit, let's say a deposit of $1,500, so their balance due would be $738, and that's after their discount. And so you could send— you can send the invoice as well directly to them. So you click Save and Send, and that would show them that they made their deposit, and then that's their balance due. Close out of here. So that's, that's basically how to do an estimate in QuickBooks Online. If you need some more bookkeeping and tax tips, go to bookkeepingforpainters.com/free-ebook and you can actually sign up to get a free ebook that will go through a lot of good bookkeeping and tax tips. I hope you have a good day. Take it easy.