In this instructional video, Daniel from BookkeepingForPainters.com walks painting contractors through configuring QuickBooks Online Plus (QBO Plus) to manage estimates, invoices, and financial insight on the go. He begins by recommending the cloud‑based QBO Plus plan for its mobile accessibility, then shows how to import a pre‑made chart of accounts tailored to painting businesses. Daniel details essential company settings—enabling classes, locations, custom transaction numbers, discounts, and deposits—to support job‑costing and profitability analysis. He explains turning on expense tracking by customer, copying estimates to invoices, and setting up service lines in the Products & Services list (exterior/interior painting, labor, materials, subcontractor labor, equipment rental) with markup calculations (approximately 2.5×). Throughout, he illustrates how classes and locations can be used to compare interior vs. exterior work, residential vs. commercial jobs, or performance across cities. The video concludes with a reminder to review the downloadable chart of accounts and related videos on estimating and invoicing.
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Hi, my name is Daniel from BookkeepingForPainters.com, and this video is how to set up your painting business in QuickBooks Online Plus. So the purpose of this video is really to allow you to create estimates and invoices on the go to save you time, and then have your QuickBooks Online setup so that you can actually get some insight on how to save money and make more money in your business. So I'm going to review the key steps in setting up your QuickBooks Online Plus for your painting business. So these are the steps. First of all, you want to get QuickBooks Online Plus, and QuickBooks Online is a cloud-based solution, so you can access your records at any time, anywhere, from any device. So this is really important for painting contractors who are on the go on different job sites all the time and they might just have a tablet or a phone with them and you can actually access your books from those devices. There's mobile apps available. And the reason why you want to get the Plus version of QuickBooks Online is because it has certain functionality that will allow you to gain better insight into your painting business's financials so you can make better decisions in your business. Next thing you want to do is to get a chart of accounts for your business that is suited. So what a chart of accounts is, is basically this, is a list of accounts that whenever you have a transaction in your business, that specific accounts track that transaction. And have a proper chart of accounts allows you to gain better insight because you have everything set up properly. I have a— you can actually download this if you go to the link in the description. You can actually download that chart of accounts, and this chart of— that chart of accounts actually has— it's set up for a painting contractor. Next thing is company settings. When you're in QuickBooks Online, you want to change your company settings. To ensure that you have some functionality turned on in there. You also want to look at creating classes, jobs, and locations, and I will review that as well. And then the last thing is set up your service lines in the products and services section. Your service lines are like, maybe your painting business says exterior and interior, and I go over how to set that up. All right, so let's go ahead and jump in QuickBooks. I have a demo company that I'm using. So the first thing you want to do is once you get your chart of accounts, you want to import that data into QuickBooks, and you go to the gear icon, click Import Data, takes you to this screen, click on Accounts. And then you'll actually just upload it, and then you'll, you'll have to— you may have to map the data. The chart of accounts that I have in the link on the description should make this process pretty easy because it's suited specifically for QuickBooks Online. And you will import the— go through the process, import the chart of accounts. I've already done this, so I'm set up here. A relatively simple process. The next thing you want to do is go to your company settings and turn on a few items. So first thing you want to make sure is turned on is under categories, make sure classes is turned on, and then also warn me— and click this one— warn me when a transaction isn't assigned to a class. This will help you out when you're doing your estimates. And, and what a class is, just to describe what that class is. A way you can use it is if you want to understand, you know, is your interior painting more profitable or is your exterior painting more profitable? And you can create two different classes for that. Or maybe you want to see, you know, are the residential jobs, painting jobs I do, are those more profitable or are my commercial jobs more profitable? You can create two different classes and you can, when you pull your profit and loss reports, you can actually see which one is doing, which one of your classes is doing better in your business. So that's one I would turn on and also track locations. If you work in one location, you probably don't need to turn this on, but maybe your painting business is in two different cities or two different towns, you might want to, you don't have to do this, but it might make sense for you to turn on locations as well. All right, next thing you want to do is ensure custom transaction numbers is turned on, discounts are turned on, and discounts basically when you're doing your estimate, a lot of common sales tactic is to give 10% off if the client signs the contract right when you do the estimate. In order to do that, a good thing to do is turn on discount and then taking deposits. Obviously, most contractors take deposits before starting work. So, alright, next thing is go to expenses and track expenses and items by customer. Want to make sure this is on. This is important for job costing. So a lot of painting contractors want to know how profitable are they on a specific job. So you'll do your estimate, the client accepts the estimate, you start work and you've budgeted in your estimate, you've budgeted the hours, how much, how many gallons of paint for that specific job. Now once you actually start executing that job and racking up employee hours and trips to the paint store. In order to see if you actually beat the budget or you're over the budget, what you want to do is something called job costing. And so that's why we want to turn on track expenses items by customer. I have a video that goes over how to do job costing. If you go to the link in the description, you can see that, access that video. Next thing you want to do is go to Advanced and make sure Copy Estimates to Invoices is turned on. And this basically makes it easier to invoice clients because you've usually put a lot of thought into the estimates, so you want to be able to copy that right onto the invoice. All right, those are the basic ones I'm gonna hit for now. Obviously you want to either take a look at this or have your accountant or bookkeeper look at that and have that set up for your business. All right, next thing. So we set up— did the company settings. Next thing we want to look at is the classes and the locations, which we turned on, if you remember, in the company settings. So I'm going to go to all lists, and you'll see now that I've turned on classes and I've turned on locations, it's showing in lists. For classes, I kind of gave the example already, commercial and residential. And this isn't mandatory, it depends on your business specifically, but if you want to see, you know, the difference in these two businesses or service lines, you might want to set up a different class for them. All right. And then for locations, pretty straightforward as well. Maybe you work in two different cities and you want to see, you know, maybe you have a sales guy in one city, a sales guy in another, or a foreman, you know, a foreman and a sales guy in one city, a foreman and a sales guy in another. And you want to see, you know, who's being more efficient, who's, you know, making more money in those respective cities, you can turn on the location tracking. Alright, and the locations and classes, these are tools to allow you to gain better insight, to allow you to make better decisions in your business. Alright, so the next thing we want to do is go to products and services. So the way you access products and services is under lists. Products and Services makes estimating and invoicing a lot easier, it makes it seem a lot more seamless. And basically for a painting contractor you want to put in your service lines into Products and Services. And right here I have an example, so exterior painting. Now you have labor hours, you have equipment rental for like pressure washers, materials, mainly paint, but also miscellaneous costs as well. And then you have, if you subcontract labor, you also have a separate one for that. So let's click on employee labor. Now, a thing to keep in mind is, so let's say that you have an employee that works $15, you pay him $15 an hour. Now after payroll taxes and Social Security and unemployment taxes and everything like that, someone that makes $15 an hour is really, you're really having to pay about, depending on where you live and everything, but let's just, it's about 15%, 10 to 15%, so let's just say $17.25 is what you're actually having to pay out per hour. Now this portion right here is the markup. A common metric is to mark up your labor and your materials about— siren going by, okay— is to mark up your labor and materials about 2.5 times. So if you divide it by 0.4, you'll get a rate of $43.12 an hour for employee labor, and it's important to include that as your rate because that's how you're going to capture your markup in your estimate, which I'll review in further depth in another video about estimates. But the key thing here is to include the markup within your service information here. And then you have your income account that it attaches to. Which in this case would be services. All right, let's take another one. Let's look at materials. And materials sub-product of exterior painting. Now this is all the materials for the job. And I used $40, which basically a lot of painting contractors try to determine how many gallons of paint is it going to take to paint this house, for example. So I used 40 just because you want to also include all your paint, caulk, glazing drops, you know, you can obviously adjust that as you need. And then the 0.4 is adding in your markup, so I have a rate of 100. So this would be— this is a technique, you don't have to do it this specific way, but So your rate of $100, if you determine that there were— you needed 10 gallons to paint this house, you would times— 10 times the rate would give you $1,000. So the— that would actually be the amount that would be added to the estimate to cover materials plus your markup. and you'll see here that this is a double-sided, so your— the markup is about $60, but the actual cost of the materials should be about $40, and that goes to the expense account. And these numbers might differ slightly depending on how much paint and everything costs in your area. So you'll need to look at that. Subcontract labor, we'll take a look at this one real quick. So it's under exterior painting once again. Let's just say that your subcontractor charges you $20 an hour. You want to— usually you want to mark that up, which we did the 0.4 again to get a rate of $50 an hour, which goes to your income account. And then this is what you're actually paying the subcontractor. All right, and might as well just look at equipment rental real quick. This is like if you need to rent a pressure washer, and once again, it includes the markup in there. And, you know, the pressure washer might only cost you $50, $50 for a half of a day use, and that's not what you pay, but you add the markup in there. All right, so that's how you set up your products and services to allow you to make your estimates pretty easy. One last thing I'll just add here, if you want to add a new— so I have exterior painting, as you can see. If you wanted to add another service line, all you hit is New. And go to Service, and then you'd actually do like Interior Painting, and you would kind of do how I set up the Exterior Painting and go through those steps. But ensuring that you really follow these steps to setting up your QuickBooks is really important to ensuring that you're going to be set up for success. Make sure you take a look at the chart of accounts in the link below and watch my videos on how to estimate and invoice in QuickBooks. Thanks.
