Linda Artesani shows how to track and rebill expenses to customers in QuickBooks Online Plus. You need to enable billable settings, create vendor checks assigned to customers, and use Products & Services items marked as purchased from vendors. Mark expenses billable when creating invoices so they appear in the invoice tray.
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Hello, Linda Artesani, Artesani Bookkeeping, and I wanted to do a short tutorial just to talk about the different things and ways and idiosyncrasies of working with billable expenses in QuickBooks Online. A lot of people can get tripped up in little tiny places in this particular program with tracking invoice— tracking billable expenses with their vendors and wanting them to show up on the invoices for their customers. So to start with, you need to have QuickBooks Online Plus to be able to do this. If you have Essentials or Simple Start, no bueno. You're not going to be able to do any of that billable expenses or even running reports on customers with showing them billable expenses. They just don't have that feature. You'd have to upgrade. That would be your first step. So say you do have the Plus or you just upgraded to the Plus and you want to start to track those things. So the first thing— first place I want you to go to is gear wheel, and you're going to come over to your Account and Settings. So there's lots of things in here, you should really explore this particular area of QuickBooks when you get— first start using the program. So I'm going to click over on Expenses, Billable Expenses, and here's the little section, but everything is off. So you always go to the pencil, kind of a global thing, and you want to show items table and show expenses and purchases on forms, so I want to have that turned on for sure. I want to track expenses and items by customer, and I want to make the expenses and the items billable. And then you can add a markup if you want, you can make it go to multiple accounts, so you've got a variety of choices in here, but we'll keep this pretty basic. So I'm going to show you where I've already created a couple of vendor checks, so I'm going to just come over to the recent transactions here. So first go to this Hall Properties And see that I've put the subcontractor expense here, and I put the company, the Amy's Bird Sanctuary. I actually have 2 checks written to Halls for the exact same amount. There's check number 73 and 72. So I'm going to go to my report. I'm going to run my profit and loss, but I don't want to run it just a plain one. I want to do it by the customer just to make sure that my expenses are showing up and my income is showing up on this job, on the Amy's Bird Sanctuary job. Okay. So I'm going to come up to Profit and Loss, and I want to do it by customer. And I'm going to run it for this year because I just did the transactions today on Valentine's Day. And I want to filter this report down. I don't want to see all the jobs. I just want to show the one job that I'm working on, which is Amy's. So I'm just going to come over to the customer here and just pick Amy's. So I filter it down to the one customer. And then you can always save this customization too. So it's showing $2,000 here, which is perfect. Both of my checks— no, my check number 73 is not showing up. So why isn't it showing up? Why isn't the coding picking up that I worked at Amy's Bird Sanctuary and I paid Hall Properties $2,000? Let's go back to check 73. It's not showing. What's missing? The customer name is not missing. So if I add Amy's here and save and close, go back to my report, and now both the checks are showing. So yay, all my expenses are showing on the job. But you can see here, I really need to bill this person because I'm in the hole. I've spent $3,000 on this person's job and not created any income. So I want to go over to my customer page. I want to click on Amy's Bird Sanctuary and I want to create an invoice. I want to bill them for the time from Hall's Property, all those people that I've just coded to that account. And I want to bill them at least $3,000 anytime that my workers have worked in it. So I'm going to create an invoice. Okay. So everything should show up in this tray if it's working properly. But as you can see, billable time is here and I can add that to my invoice, but I can't add those 2— I can't add those 2 things from my 2 subcontractors. They're not showing up in the tray at all. We'll go back to it here. So why aren't they showing up here? It's going to be another setting, right? That makes the most sense. I'm going to come back over to my settings. I know I checked off everything in Account and Settings, so it's going to be something to do with my products and services. So the thing about QuickBooks Online is you need to have items and use the items in your transactions in order to show these things on the invoices. That's how it sees things to put on invoices. It doesn't see the expenses, it only sees the items. So I need to come over here and use my item, not my expense for my subcontractor. So I need to come down here and this is usually closed and you're like, well, where do I put the item? Well, you just come over here and click down. So I'm going to type in subcontractor and hopefully it will show up. It doesn't ever seem to do that, which is one of my products. So let's go in here and find it. Why isn't it showing? It's not even showing here. Why isn't it showing? Well, there's my first clue. Something's wrong with my, my product and services. So see, this is why I wanted to do this video. There's so many things that are— that can happen wrong. So I know I have a subcontractor item. Here it is. So I want to edit it and find out why aren't you showing up on my list so I can pull you in and put you on my vendor expense. And the reason why I don't have this little tiny box down here that says I purchased this product or service from vendor, and then you can type in subcontractor on the job here as well. And then hit save and close. That little button is going to make a world of difference. So let's go back to our 3 checks here, and I want to make sure that I show these. So instead of subcontractor expense, this should allow me to bring this in now. There it is. Now it's— I'm able to bring it in. I'm going to just put the $1,000 here, and then I'm going to trash can this. And then I also need to make sure it says Amy's. Save and close. I'm going to do that with all 3 transactions. I'm just going to come over here, go to the next one. And that's such a handy tool to be able to come up here and find these things and type in subcontractor. Make sure it's $1,000. Come to Amy's and then trash can that one. Save and close. There's one more up here. Change it to an item. Amy. So that's where the marking it up would work. So I'm actually going to bill her back for the exact amount that I paid, which you probably wouldn't want to do, but for this, for this record purposes that we're doing this here. So now I'm going to go back to my customer. Now I'm going to bill her. I need to get my money in. I need to bill her for the time that my employee worked there and bill her back for the money I have out of my pocket for paying my vendors for her job. So I'm going to come over here and click Create an Invoice. And now in the tray, it should show all of those subcontractor items. And it doesn't. Why doesn't it? Well, it's not showing because I neglected to click on Billable. You need to do that if you don't have that little box. So you can see how this could compound a user's frustration, right? Mm-hmm. So all you have to do is just check off these things, and I won't go through all of them, but I'll go back to my customer. And now I'm going to create an invoice for her. And now, hallelujah, they better be in the tray. And there they are. So I can add them to my bill. And send her an invoice for the amount of money that's due now. And I can, you know, add up or add something else in here, but now they're showing. So as you can see, there's so many ways that you can have an issue with billable expenses. It's one little box here, one little box there. If you just forget any of those things in the sequencing of setting this up, they don't show and you can't bill them. So I hope that clears things up for people. I know it can seem like a little puzzle. But it's all those little pieces, if you put them together, it allows you to do some billable expenses and rebill back to your customer. I hope this video was helpful. If you have any further questions, please feel free to reach out to me. My website, www.artisansbookkeeping.com. If you want to stay in touch with me, follow my blog, please do that. Follow me on YouTube, follow me on Facebook. Thank you. Bye now.
