How to track ad/hoc expenses for a Project/Job/Customer

Unknown

I've seen some past answers on this and was hoping there may be a better way of doing this that I am unaware of:

I have a consulting business and want to run a profitability report on a Per Customer/Job basis.  Many of my expenses for a particular job may be ad-hoc and entered on the fly (i.e. I travel to the customer site, take an Uber there, etc...) and those would not be billable on an invoice.

Essentially I want to be able to run a profitability report on a single Customer/Job which shows the income and expenses for that job.

If I create an invoice and apply the payment towards that, it only let's me choose a Business tag.  If I create another tag, it puts it under the OTHER category and won't let me choose it.

After reading posts, it seems that I only have a few options, one of which seems that I would have to create a vendor invoice for every single expense and "pay" it so I can track that to the Project/Job.

Another is to just create an OTHER tag for each Project/Job and then run a report on that.

Problem is that I cannot seem to find/create a report that would show income by a specific Customer/Job and then Expenses by a single tag on the same report.

Unknown

I am interested in this also. Can someone from Quicken help?

Unknown

So here is what I found so far (kind of a PITA).   You can enter transactions separately and tag a business expense.  However, to assign them to a Job/Project you need to create an invoice for that amount, tag the job in the invoice, and then submit a payment.

I also found that when submitting a payment for the invoice if it finds a matching transaction in, for example, your credit card entry that it will prompt you to use the matching transaction.

What I have been doing is creating a single invoice for a project to a vendor I call INTERNAL.  I add line items that match the different business categories for each transaction.  I then submit partial payments to that vendor invoice and allow it to "match" with currently entered transactions. That assigns that transaction to the job so a proper costing report can be generated.

In all, a colossal PITA but at least I can get the correct reports I want.

It would be SO MUCH EASIER if it simply allowed you to select a job when entering the transaction.  I also am still looking for a way to assign mileage to a job. 

Unknown

BJ:Why not create an initial invoice for a customer then as you add more expenses simply add them as a line item to the existing invoice?

Unknown

ModelStructures said:

BJ:Why not create an initial invoice for a customer then as you add more expenses simply add them as a line item to the existing invoice?

Thanks for the feedback!  The trick is that I'm not invoicing the client for these expenses.  I have a long-term outstanding project for each client for a fixed fee (either monthly or per day, depending on the client).  I've already figured into my pricing model that I have expenses.  I simply need to track those expenses against that project/job so I can run profitability reports for each one to see if I'm on budget.

The only way I found to make this work is to create a separate vendor invoice and payment for every single expense.  This can mean that each time I travel I can have 20 vendor invoices for such items as parking, hotel, airfare, meals, etc...  It is challenging to track each one separately.  I'd just love to have an option that when I download my credit card statement, for example, that I can assign an expense to a job on the fly.

Unknown

bjaffe01 said:

So here is what I found so far (kind of a PITA).   You can enter transactions separately and tag a business expense.  However, to assign them to a Job/Project you need to create an invoice for that amount, tag the job in the invoice, and then submit a payment.

I also found that when submitting a payment for the invoice if it finds a matching transaction in, for example, your credit card entry that it will prompt you to use the matching transaction.

What I have been doing is creating a single invoice for a project to a vendor I call INTERNAL.  I add line items that match the different business categories for each transaction.  I then submit partial payments to that vendor invoice and allow it to "match" with currently entered transactions. That assigns that transaction to the job so a proper costing report can be generated.

In all, a colossal PITA but at least I can get the correct reports I want.

It would be SO MUCH EASIER if it simply allowed you to select a job when entering the transaction.  I also am still looking for a way to assign mileage to a job. 

Correction on this.  Doing it this way makes the reports look AWFUL with Quicken breaking down individual expenses arbitrarily.  It is hard to explain.  The math works.  The display does not.  The only way it works is to create individual vendor invoices/payments for each expense. 

Unknown

ModelStructures said:

BJ:Why not create an initial invoice for a customer then as you add more expenses simply add them as a line item to the existing invoice?

How about instead of invoices set up a 'business' account - call it ad hoc expenses. Record all ad-hoc expenses but use tags for different jobs/customers. Call up report by 'tag'????????

Unknown

ModelStructures said:

BJ:Why not create an initial invoice for a customer then as you add more expenses simply add them as a line item to the existing invoice?

Tags are really designed more for specific businesses and not individual jobs/projects.  If I enter one expense at a time with a bill/payment it works perfectly.  Just cumbersome.