$.25 cents please

we always charge shipping and line item it if clients need justification of price

Go into "Help Index" enter this into the search field "items, grouped together"
it will tell you have to create a group such as Network Jack Prewire, you then enter in the specifics such as 100ft Cat5 and .25 hours labor.

There are a couple ways to handle this:
Make an item that you purchase, say a 1000' spool of RG-6 as a non-inventory item. Then setup a different item that you sell, say 1 foot of RG-6, also as a non-inventory item. As far as QB knows, these are two unrelated items. They would need to both be non-inv items since there will be only buying of one and only selling of the other, and no way to make one decrement the other.

The second way is to make a single inventory item in the units you sell at, like 1 foot. So you purchase qty 1000 when you buy a spool (you have to calculate the cost per foot), and you then sell by the foot. However this way would expect that you add those line items on your sales receipt/invoice.

Best way if you just want a single line invoice for $150 to install the drop is to forget using QB to track that item as inventory. When you buy this and other supplies as COGS, everything will come out right. At the end of year, you can take an actual inventory count and determine it's value, then make a GL entry to 'hard code' in your inventory so you balance sheet works right for the tax preparer.

This is what I learned from my bookkeeper that helped me initially setup my QB database. I like my stuff squared away and solid, rather than creating a can of worms that has to be repaired once a year.

Only way QB can handle this properly is the Manufacturing and Wholesale edition, which can understand that some item you sell ($150 drop charge) in made up of qty X of this item, qty Y of that item, etc. However that said, the M&W edition is a piece of junk, and leaves alot to be desired. I had to get a refund for that one and go down to Pro.

Bill is right using QB to track inventory of cable, plates and stuff sounds great but quickly becomes a PITA. What is the point of tracking something that cost $0.10 (price per foot of cable) when you are not sure exactly how much you are using. Say you run 10 lines in a house. You think you average 100ft. But your guys use 1 full box and 10 feet of the next. That ends up being 1ft more per run. Is it worth spending hours trying to figure that out?

We charge and mark up for everything. Can't stay in biz too long if you don't.
Right now getting ready to have a separate line item for travel cuz this gas problem is not going to go away anytime soon, if ever. At almost $60.00 per fillup, it will break you if you don't watch that. Fill up twice a week @ $60.00, works out to $420.00 a month. Thats a truck payment in itself.

My explanation of setting up a group item above does exactly this...

Hey cma is right!
I never tried group items before since we use a seperate program to handle assemblies.

Yeah, it works ok but it would be nice to be able to further adjust each item within the group and only effect the group. There are some work arounds though by creating dummy items.

cma,

I tried what you suggested, and it worked! Thanks. However, take for example the item cable line install. I want it to always be $150, no matter what. Is there a way to accomplish this? I like the idea that I can track inventory like cable wire and compression connectors, and the fact that I have a reminder when to reorder. Can I just give a full discount on everything, and have the last item in the group be something like "cable line install" at $150? Would that work? For example, the cable wire is $25, the connectors are $1 for 2, so it would give a discount for $26 and then add $150. Is that what you do? Thanks for your help.

Forget it. I have been trying all day to set it up but it is too much work as some of you said. If I buy bulk cable wire and use it for several jobs, and I list it as cogs, I know it will balance out in the end, but how then do you determine how much profit you made on each job? Without tracking how much cable and other inventory you used, it looks like you made more than you did. I am ready to shoot myself!

It's difficult, I currently do not use QuickBooks for inventory and I do not have a set price of $150 per Tv outlet. I do have prices set up per drop but it is a materials price only, no Labor, so for instance a network jack is $15,that is for a box and a wall plate. Obviously not every jack uses 100ft of wire, some more, some less, that is why using Quick Books or any other program that way will never work out with inventory. What I have been doing lately is I sell the whole prewire as a system, I estimate that amount of wire needed for each job and charge the customer for that amount of wire, plus the approriate amount for each jack location, plus the estimated labor. If there is wire left over then I have made a little extra on the job, after you have been doing this for a while you will get pretty good at estimating the amount you will need. Also in Colorado we do not charge sale tax on labor so if your labor is rolled into the $150 for the jack then the client is wasting alot of money in sales tax and the state is getting money that they really shouldn't be getting.

To a large part I used this book to help me setup Quickbooks, it works well very well for our industry.

[Link: onlineaccounting.com]

This is a good resource for Quickbooks help,

[Link: quickbooksusers.com]