WSW - Podcast Job Costing Series Part 3: Capturing costs the right way
===
[00:00:00]
Dan DeLong: Welcome to another workshop Wednesday. Where is it? There it is. Okay. I had to find the right thing to click on here. Workshop Wednesday. Casual conversations for serious workflows, and you freaked me out there for a second there, Shanna, because you left and came back while [00:01:00] you were running around.
While the video was counting down,
Shanna Quinn: I was letting my cat out.
Dan DeLong: Okay, duty calls when the cat needs in instructions or taken care of. Yeah.
Sponsor Mention and Series Overview
---
Dan DeLong: But this workshop is brought to you by school bookkeeping.com, where you can keep learning QuickBooks your way. And as you have noticed, this is the continuing saga of job costing series that we're doing, with the job costing Ninja.
Shanna Quinn, how are you?
Shanna Quinn: My hands come out of picture when I try to do that, Ryan, I'm doing good. I'm doing good. I wish we had some cooler weather here, but doing good.
Dan DeLong: All right.
Discussion on AI and Intuit's Integration
---
Dan DeLong: Before we begin I wanted to share a, a. A thought [00:02:00] or a blog article, a update, whatever we wanna call this.
Because Shanna and I we attended the Intuit Connect, Intuit conference a couple weeks ago. And Intuit was very, heavy on the message of artificial intelligence and this whole concept of AI plus ai. Where it's Intuit intelligence is what the branded AI is going to be combined with humans, right?
So we have this idea of, the artificial intelligence that's doing the bulk of the heavy lifting when it comes to the client work or the the tasks that. That are easily repeatable. And then the hi, which is the human intelligence of [00:03:00] someone with a brain, with a real brain going in and checking the work of the artificial yeah.
In intelligence. Shanna, since you since you attended what was your takeaway with this whole idea of. Machines and humans working together in harmony, which
Shanna Quinn: I don't know, I just have a flashback of the Will Smith movie.
Dan DeLong: IRobot.
Shanna Quinn: Yeah, iRobot. That's like what comes into my mind. Unless they do make me delicious pies, I wouldn't know that.
Especially this season. I think that. AI has come a long way. And there are some true benefits to it. I use it within my firm but I [00:04:00] don't, intuit better not come after me for this, I do not like Intuit's ai. I don't the the change that they made to our dashboards for bank bead and all of that.
I actually reverted all of mine back to classic that it would allow me to because it was constantly giving me this issue where it would not remember the vendor name for an expense that literally post every single month. And it's been going to the same vendor and same expense account for. 10 plus years.
And so that kept messing up or it was directing it to the wrong account. Or we would enter the vendor verify, expense, and then when I would go to do my month end, I'm like, how come I have all these transactions where the vendor names are missing? And I went back and redid it [00:05:00] myself and was finding, okay, we are, it is truly on their end.
The vendor name is not sticking when I'm processing that transaction. I think the other side of it too is just for me and what I do, what we specialize in with my firm. We still heavily rely on humans to tell me that Home Depot receipt was for this cost code and this job. And despite how amazing AI is becoming bill.com.
Is not auto, is not good enough to tell me that information and be accurate all the time. And receipt processing foundations or applications like Hubdoc and even double those are not able to automatically grab that information and enter that in there. So there still has to absolutely.
Dan DeLong: [00:06:00] Yeah. One of the, one of the takeaways or, from the conference itself was this kind of evolution of the AI agents that we're seeing inside of QuickBooks Online show up. The accounting agent, the payroll agent, the payments agent, the project management agent.
They're all quickBooks helpers, so to speak. Some of them are marketing disguised as helpers. Some of them are, yeah, some of them are actual, insights supposed to be able to drive insights or anomaly detection, which is. That's where things are gonna really be helpful when it comes to ai.
It's Hey, the fa, the past 16 times, you've categorized this particular [00:07:00] payee as this particular account. Why this one? Or hey, this month there was a huge drop or spike in a certain account. This is potentially why I, those are some of the neat things that are, coming up in the ai.
But just today or yesterday, I within the last 24 hours. Yeah. There is, there was a major announcement from Intuit. We are regarding its investment with chat DPT, which it was surprising. To me, right? To that, oh, they're gonna be spending a hundred million dollars to to fully integrate with chat GPT what, happened in the past four years where they're talking about creating their own Right.
And where, is that coming from? [00:08:00] Clearly a surprise announcement. They've been working on this. Probably prior to Intuit Connect and continuing on after, it's not just like it's Intu Connect, they decided to switch gears and go working with chat GPT.
So I'm working on a blog article and I'm gonna put it in there, in the comments there. Because it is still a work in progress because of the. Most recent information made publicly available. But it boils down to, human, human in intelligence and, in artificial intelligence.
Concerns About AI and Data Security
---
Dan DeLong: And this particular investment that Intuit is making, integrating with, raises [00:09:00] a lot of questions and, for and, I think question that I had at WI Connect with artificial intelligence is how do, how you're dealing with a lot of sensitive data in a business financial, perspective, right?
You've got payroll in there with all the, people that have social notification numbers to pay the payroll. There's EIN. There's credit card information, there's identifiable information about customers and your vendors, everything there. So I was really concerned about how that data is being used and utilized by the artificial intelligence.
Is it they're going to potentially be, a breach of that information. And I was okay with their [00:10:00] explanation. Hey, we. This is all under our umbrella. 'cause Intuit is fairly good at safeguarding sensitive data from everything from tax returns to payroll. I was okay in, with that answer.
But now that, thanks to chat GPT, this is now opening up that door. Okay. Are we really sure that just because chat, G-B-C-G-B-T has a setting that says do not share personally and do not feed the machines with this information.
Shanna Quinn: Keep it local Within my chat.
Dan DeLong: Is that do we trust?
So maybe that's the question of the day. With this topic, do we trust chat GPT with. Sensitive data, [00:11:00] because I know that Yeah,
Shanna Quinn: that's,
Dan DeLong: it's
Shanna Quinn: scary. I think it's scary. I have Norton 360 and Life 360 and all that monitoring and get notifications, I think almost on a monthly basis about potential hacks and the information of mine that could have potentially been at risk.
And these are also large companies. We're talking about our local hospital. We're talking about, I think I actually, one of them was from a long time ago with Verizon a long time ago. So it's it is scary. It's, based off of what we put out there, all that stuff could just be shareable and that, and you
Dan DeLong: have, initially you had all of these ai, AI companies and the CEO of open AI going to Congress and saying, we, [00:12:00] we need regulation. Nothing's happened, yet. So they're basically self-regulating themselves. And, is that do you trust chat GPT with potentially sensitive financial information about your business?
I guess that's the,
Shanna Quinn: I like
Dan DeLong: that's the takeaway here.
Shanna Quinn: I like, that blog idea. Yeah. I find that it's funny that it got announced on the day that like what was it? Cloud, something that. That chat. Oh, CloudFlare, yeah. Use it was like crashed.
Dan DeLong: Yeah. And I certainly understand the, the reason right for Intuit to work with chat GPT and invest in, in chat GBT when it comes [00:13:00] to, working in ai.
Like why reinvent the wheel? Right when a lot of people, accountants included, are doing the same thing with chat GPT, right? Like they'll homogenize or take out PDF information about the company and then maybe up, maybe upload that, that financial file or that, that financial report to chat GPT and then provided a prompt to be able to provide that initial analysis and then be using that to.
Have conversations with their clients, right? This is not a new thing, it's just now replacing the. The human piece of copy paste homogenize. So again, do you trust the machines to do that the way that you would? [00:14:00] That is a big leap of faith, I think when it comes, to that, kind of information.
Yeah, absolutely. So, this will continue to unfold as we. See new, see more information released. But that is where we're at today.
Job Costing Series Recap
---
Dan DeLong: So that's a slight diversion off topic because we wanna get back to our job costing series with Shanna about capturing job costs.
And we talked initially a couple weeks ago about just the foundations and talking about The The conver. I can't think now that I'm, I got so worked up about the ai. You did. So we talked first about the, standard, the fundamentals of Yes. Of job costing.
Shanna Quinn: [00:15:00] Yeah. And
Dan DeLong: then we talked about last week about setting up, setting it up the right way.
Shanna Quinn: Yeah.
Dan DeLong: So now we're actually gonna get into the. I don't wanna say meat and potatoes, but because I, apparently use that term or phrase too much. But let's get to the main course.
Shanna Quinn: Okay. We could say the Turkey and potatoes we're almost there,
Dan DeLong: Right. Since we're almost near Thanksgiving, but talking about capturing costs the right way.
Capturing Job Costs Effectively
---
Dan DeLong: Shawna, what is. What is your main source of truth? Where do you most of your job costs originate, with your clients? Is it certain transactions or where do those costs come from?
Shanna Quinn: The majority of 'em are, when we're, especially on clients that we do t and m with the time and material plus the markup [00:16:00] we're. Obviously them, probably ma doing their billables, right? So account billable or account payables. So we're managing the bills, we're recording the bills, putting the cost code in, marking it, billable, referencing the job expenses because every contractor, no matter how organized and how far ahead you plan, always has to have a run to Home Depot, Lowe's.
Or Ace Hardware or Sherwin Williams. There's always last minute expenses. And now because of everything being so accessible online, a lot of material now gets purchased through online orders as opposed to a pre-order of something and then receiving a bill and then having to pay for it.
It just is running through credit cards. All of that. And then obviously payroll. So it's, it is a mix of of everything that we can to make sure we're, capturing all expenses. [00:17:00]
Dan DeLong: I think the, probably the, biggest thing is missed costs, right? Like that, that, that trip to Home Depot or the surprise or just.
The workflow's not there. What, what has been the process for for capturing those those costs for you and your, clients?
Shanna Quinn: Anything that we receive especially because there are, the majority of our bills are from subcontractors or large material orders, so those we're typically getting the bill because those are ones we have to turn around and pay.
And obviously the, our vendors are subcontractors. Are very on top of making sure we have their bill. For the miscellaneous stuff, like what you mentioned and any other kind of expense that lands on a [00:18:00] credit card, because we're monitoring all of our clients' bank feed, we're able to see what we have.
And a receipt for, and what we don't have a receipt for when we're processing that bank feed. So on the day before, or at least once a week, we go to our clients and say, here are expenses through these individual accounts that we have seen clear. But we don't have a receipt, so we don't know how to book them.
So it's up to our clients. And most of our clients have a either project manager or job super that's in charge of that. They should be able to provide us that information, send us a receipt. Sometimes it's some, I've got a lot of pictures of men's jeans as they're driving in the truck seat.
Yeah. The receipts there and you can see the junk on the floor or probably the other receipts that I've asked for that are underneath his seat. Those are conversations that [00:19:00] we have with our clients on a weekly basis at minimum. Anything that they do not provide to us.
Sits, goes immediately into an Ask Client account. And then we're communicating with our clients through we use double for our task management and for our and for our client, platforms. And so they're able to go into their platform and see that we've sent them a request saying this came through.
You haven't told me what job it needs to go to. Typically will wait two weeks. Before we put it into that account for the Ask Client. But I won't wait. If it's over a certain amount and we are doing like TNM with them 'cause we wanna make sure that we're capturing that, that expense and therefore that reimbursement to them for their clients.
Managing Client Expenses and Communication
---
Dan DeLong: How frequently do you 'cause what I'm gathering from what you're seeing is that, part of your [00:20:00] engagement with clients like this is for. You and your team to help manage. The expense process. Yeah. How frequently does that get reviewed? Is that a, daily thing for you and your team or is it routine and or does it depend?
Based on the, client,
Shanna Quinn: it does vary based off of our client. We are in the bank feed. I'm more of a keep up than catch up kind of person, so I would much rather. Spend five minutes, if that's all that is work needing to be done from a transactional booking and review standpoint and the bank feed on a daily basis for all of our clients.
Then get in the day before that, we have to generate invoices and be like, oh my gosh, there's all this stuff we have. So those are all set up to, at minimum, we're doing it two to three times a week. We're not waiting for a massive amount to have to go in and do it. I want it taken care of. [00:21:00] And I want our clients to have that consistent.
That consistency and communication from us as well. The more they actually hear from us, the more likely they're eventually gonna just try to give us as much as we need so they realize can cut that back.
Dan DeLong: Yeah. How many times do you reach out before they get annoyed with hearing from you? Oh,
Shanna Quinn: I have a few that don't seem to have a limit.
That's when I get out my, like text messages that do have like little burning fires with the outline of a butt. Or I'll threaten to not pay them. I'm gonna withhold your paycheck.
Dan DeLong: There you go. Extortion.
Shanna Quinn: I.
Dan DeLong: It'd be a shame if something happened to your paycheck. That's
Shanna Quinn: right. Whoops. It went into my account.
Dan DeLong: I dunno how that happened. Alright. And so have you [00:22:00] ever seen that there is projects that were assigned to the wrong project or, project expenses that were assigned to the wrong project?
Or how do you ensure that? They're categorized appropriately because you have the ones where it's no, ones that are empty, but what if they're categorized, but put to the wrong one.
Shanna Quinn: So we're performing at least on a week or biweekly basis, we're doing the invoicing, which we require.
Clients to manually review and approve before we send them out. Or, and, or they're able to capture it through that through the job reports that we're generating. So it, some of 'em might stand out to us internally because when I'm booking it and I can pull up that job report for that client that of theirs and be like.
It's weird 'cause we didn't even [00:23:00] quote at all doing an outdoor kitchen. I don't see an estimate for that, but that's what this bill is for. But I do know on this other job, that's what we're doing. So I can go to our client and say, we received this bill, it referenced this job, but maybe it's meant for this house instead.
I just wanted to verify with you. Okay.
Dan DeLong: So that's really the checkpoint or the guardrail that you have in place is that before. Something goes out to a customer. There is someone at the company that is doing the approval that has their sign of a seal of approval stamp on, on that before it even goes out.
So they'll potentially catch it on the invoice or seeing. Seeing the job costing report and going, we didn't even do anything for this one this week. Why, Why is there a huge expense?
Shanna Quinn: Yeah. Why, is my electric five times what it was supposed to be [00:24:00] for this project? Yeah.
Dan DeLong: All right.
So that's a, good best practice. So that those things don't. Get past the point of, no return. Yeah. And then, and
Shanna Quinn: there're good extra steps to take. It is not, we're not gonna know, we're relying on our vendors, we're relying on our client's vendors and we're relying on our clients and their staff to give us the direction.
But we internally can take some extra steps to stuff like that could really throw you off. And so having the job reports up and then having that estimate versus actual for the jobs that are active for that client, while you're doing the processing of these bills and the receipts.
That's just taking that extra step so that you're not, you're cap, you're capturing it and then sending it to your client and then they're like, oh, thank you so much for catching that. There's a little bit more of an appreciation of what we're [00:25:00] doing for them because we were able to capture something that was a potential big error.
Dan DeLong: Got it.
Best Practices for Cost Codes and Invoicing
---
Dan DeLong: Now, when, you, we talk about cost codes and setting up the products and services items to, to capture your, cost codes properly in, in prior workshops that then gets used on expense transactions as items or in the product services area. But of course, we know that there is a section for just putting it right to the account.
Is there a, a, a. A a, best practice as far as using one or the other? Or does it matter? Or which you find is where things get off, go off the rails if you use one, one of those or the other.
Shanna Quinn: When you book an expense directly to an expense account or even directly to a cost of goods account because you're generating.
An [00:26:00] invoice off of that, when you go generate your invoice, it's actually gonna be blank. No information comes over and it's not gonna record or report properly because it's not set up to be something that is meant to be billed. Because in QuickBooks it's either yes, I had billable or no. It will still allow you to perform that function because we're generating invoices, but it doesn't allow there's not like a, Hey, don't do this because when you go to generate this invoice, the information, there's no cost code.
'cause that's what invoices pull from is our cost codes. So nothing generates there, the note, anything it definitely is best practice to, if you're gonna have cost codes, use your cost codes and only use your cost codes.
Dan DeLong: Yeah. 'cause there's a preference and a setting inside of, QuickBooks to count reimbursable expenses as income.
But the challenge [00:27:00] there is. That's one account, right? The, you're only gonna be specifying one account for all of your revenue reimbursed expenses.
Shanna Quinn: And and then you, can't dive into that.
Technical Difficulties and Cost Codes
---
Shanna Quinn: You can't do an estimate versus actual off of that. So that to me is if actually we've never even used that.
I have small tool. I'll create a cost code for a lot of my clients because that.
Dan DeLong: Oh,
we lost you Mid-sentence.
Shanna Quinn: It said the way we're waiting for the host to join. That was weird. The, I just completely lost my train of thought.
Dan DeLong: Thanks, restream. Maybe it was chat, GPT smiting us. Oh, no. For, talking about
Shanna Quinn: Or the word is out negatively. Put them [00:28:00] down. What was I talking about, Dan?
Job Costing and Reimbursable Expenses
---
Dan DeLong: We were talking about the using the cost codes. Or using the re reimbursable expenses setting.
Shanna Quinn: Oh yes. The you can't do, you can't pull an estimate versus actual off of that. So you are not truly able to job costs properly. The. Oh, I was also saying that the majority of my clients, because everybody in construction, they all want Hey, I've got this punch list, which is just like miscellaneous materials that at the end of the job, they're finishing up, they're cleaning up and oh, we've got this, we've got that.
So all of their runs to Home Depot for touch up paint or for some shins, right? Everything just goes to punch list. So we have that miscellaneous thing, or we, I call it punch list or small tools that are purchased specifically for jobs. [00:29:00] So there are things too that will get left behind with that job, right?
That's a cost code, not an expense. And so it is technically for some people going to be considered an expense if you have a small tool that you're purchasing and reusing three multiple jobs. But if you're leaving that tool because it was for something specifically that client asked you to install, you can run it through there and then you're just leaving.
But it would still be a cost of good.
Dan DeLong: Like you said, something that, that, that kind of perked up my ears, like you for the, job costing that you do with your clients, you wouldn't even bother with that setting inside of QuickBooks for the reimbursable re tracking, the reimbursable expenses.
Is there any company or any workflow where that is. A, an [00:30:00] option I'm sure in your, mind, like, why do we even have that setting? Because I'm never gonna use it. But is there a use case for someone to use that setting of tracking reimbursable expenses as income?
Shanna Quinn: Honestly think modernizing, I think be, I think because we're such detailed people with how, because of job costing being a big part of what we do, and that it means that I need to see the nitty gritty.
I need to see the very down to the individual receipt details. I think not. But because it doesn't give you a big enough picture for you to track properly.
Dan DeLong: Yeah. Yeah. 'cause if you're, if you don't have that setting turned on and you're using expenses on the, booking it directly to the, expense account on the [00:31:00] expense type transaction, two, two strikes against you if you're using Shanna for your, for your, accounting help, if you are using that.
And you book that you, bill that back to your customer and you're not using the income. What's gonna happen is it's going to post the revenue as a negative expense. Yeah. Which will be like a third strike against you if you, if Shanna was, and you
Shanna Quinn: Yes.
Dan DeLong: Because how are you gonna do accurate income?
You're not gonna get your actual, income and expenses per customer or per job when you're tracking expenses that are booked that are billed back to the customer as negative expenses.
Shanna Quinn: Even for myself within my own firm, when I am so year [00:32:00] end I have clients that reach out to us with beginning of the year, I have clients that reach out and say, Hey, Shanna, can you help refile my reinstatement or status, good satisfaction filing for the states, right?
So I'll go in, we'll process that really easily for our clients and then we'll provide them with that. Even that I have individual cost codes set up so that when those expense hit my account, I mark the billable, put 'em right to the client, and then when we're generating invoices, all of those expenses get picked up when we send that invoice out to our clients.
And what's really nice too, about that functionality through QuickBooks is that you could actually then attach. All of those receipt images to the invoices that you're sending. So if you are an a contractor that provides that receipt image back up to your to the client, it's nice and easy [00:33:00] to do that.
Obviously I wanna be able to do it to justify, Hey, you paid me $300 to file this state certification for you. So here's your copy of the receipt. Here's your good standing certificate.
Dan DeLong: So you practice what you preach? Yes. By, doing your own cost codes, right? So I do Drinking your own champagne or eating your own dog food.
I dunno what we got all sorts of,
Shanna Quinn: I love a good champagne.
Dan DeLong: All right.
Purchase Orders and Third-Party Integrations
---
Dan DeLong: So what about purchase orders and, using that in, in the workflow of. Capturing costs and such as that. What talk about your best practices with purchasing.
Shanna Quinn: Purchasing. The majority of my clients, actually none of my clients use purchasing within QuickBooks.
It just wasn't really clean enough and didn't have that sort of [00:34:00] stacked review and approval process that we needed. Although now that's changed a lot with the advanced version but with the majority of our clients that have that process in place, we use a third party product with them.
For job costing. So whether it be Buildertrend or job tread or, oh my gosh, what's the other one out there that just completely escaped, nullify oh yeah. Those services all have great controls over it, and it's better for the client and they integrate really easily.
From a simplicity standpoint, because if I've got that information in there, I don't also need it in my QuickBooks. So I have them all set up. So it's only once it's approved and verified by both the vendor and the whether it's the supervisor [00:35:00] or the project manager for those jobs that it was done.
It was done as satisfaction. It gets approved by both, and then it pushes over into our quick box as a bill.
Dan DeLong: Excellent.
Handling Reimbursed Expenses
---
Dan DeLong: So now let's move over to, like reimbursed expenses, right? Let's talk about what that is to begin with. When, we're talking about reimbursed expense, not just the reimbursed expense with, to the business, but reimbursed expense to the person.
Purchasing. So this could be talk about the different scenarios where that could occur, and then we'll talk about what we do, how we handle that.
Shanna Quinn: This happens quite frequently where they forgot their card or they used their on accident instead of the company, right? And I say on accident because we all do that so that we get the points.
[00:36:00] So I know specifically I've got one client who's, he always forgets and I'm like, it's because he wants the points for himself, right? Not for us as my client to get it. So I completely get it. But we deal with that one a lot. And so we actually handle that. It's a little bit more challenging 'cause we're job costing something that we are reimbursing, but, we, I basically have set up, which is similar to how I handle, returns that are done through a, not through a credit card. Because on and credit card expenses, our credit card credits can be made billable. But if I've got a return of money that went dress directly into my bank account. From a transactional standpoint, I can't make that deposit, [00:37:00] billable so that I give credit back for that refund to my client's, clients for the jobs, which if we're doing t and m, I wanna be able to do that.
So I actually have a dummy set credit card account set up for all of my clients who accidentally have this happen a lot or for the purpose of refunds versus credit card returns. If they're doing t and m, and so I use that and then I just do a journal ending to offset it. The actual bank account where it posts, but it for me to make it billable and track that expense properly, I run it through our dummy credit card account.
Dan DeLong: Now that's a dummy in terms of the, credit card, not. Any kind of commentary on, on on the user of the credit card?
Shanna Quinn: Sometimes they overlap. No. Absolutely. Just from a [00:38:00] do not use it should always essentially be zero,
Dan DeLong: right? So it just and you could have this, it can make the same case for co-mingling of funds.
Where, they, you know. Just as you had mentioned on accident, yes. I used, my own personal account, or they do it on purpose where okay, I am contributing to the business and you wanna handle it that way. I lost Shanna again. Where'd she go?
Shanna Quinn: Is it me?
Dan DeLong: I don't know. You I,
Shanna Quinn: am showing perfect bars on my side, so frustrating.
Dan DeLong: I'm not sure where you keep running off to and you have the shortest bio breaks, ever known. Anyway, so apologize for the technical issues. Maybe this is part of the cloud [00:39:00] flare outage recovery from last, from yesterday. We're gonna go with that. We'll go with that. Yeah. We talked about reimbursable expenses.
We talked about using purchasing and. Potentially some of these things are outside of, the realm of QuickBooks because, QuickBooks is the shallow end of the pool when when it comes with to, to a lot of these things, right?
Best Practices for Capturing Costs
---
Dan DeLong: So how do you catch and fix costs that were posted to the wrong pro process or what's your checkpoint in place to make sure that those things are categorized appropriately or fixing mistake.
Shanna Quinn: We invoice our clients. I don't wait for month end or statement drop. I like to make sure that we are capturing everything, especially because of how much. Data. Depending on how many active jobs our clients might have, we might [00:40:00] have a couple of hundred transactions by month end. So for me, it's just easier to make sure that we are staying on top of everything by doing week ending or week beginning reconciliations for our clients.
So whether it's an actual true wreck. With that hard date in there or for some of 'em, because the job counts might fluctuate. We'll put the date in, put what that balance should be and then check it. And then leave it there and then update it again. And push it and push it till what's month end depending on what or feeling,
Dan DeLong: so you're a couple things that I heard you say that I think just encapsulates the best practice of this is that, keeping up rather than catching up. So being on, the front end of it as opposed to waiting until, month or weeks or months go by and, oh we need, yeah [00:41:00] we need to fix this or.
And in, in conjunction with that setting up approval processes so that someone at the business takes the burden of the responsibility, when there is something that is gonna ultimately be customer, their customer facing that. Would you say that's pretty much the two best practices?
If, somebody had. I need just two things to walk away from this workshop with. Would those be it or would, there be another?
Shanna Quinn: With me it would be probably a hundred more, but for, yeah, I would say those are definitely the two best. I think that keeping up is how you give your clients the best feedback on how they're doing.
If you're always a month behind. You're not just a month behind on the information that you're giving to them. Now, who's gonna remember that [00:42:00] Lowes trip at the beginning of the month? What job is that? I don't know. Just put it to anything. That's always like the fallback answer from some of our clients.
And years ago I implemented that we won't allow transactions to continue to go, or it will jeopardize their relationship with us. So if you want us to continue to support you, you have to be proactively involved and you have to provide this feedback. Otherwise our we're here to try to give you the information you need to make it so that you're profitable individually by job, but also overall as a company.
Input and being there, having your clients be a part of that is essential.
Dan DeLong: Yeah. And is there a report or a tool that you use that is your your go-to go-to tool to make sure that you catch all of [00:43:00] these or catch most? There's. There's never, nothing's foolproof because fools are so ingenious.
But yeah,
Shanna Quinn: there is a saying. I probably I'll ble I'll do bleep, but you you put bleep in, you get bleep out. I would say that nine out of 10 times, if we've missed something that should be billable, it's probably because we might have had a client rushing through and just did one of those passive things that just says, put it to this.
And didn't put it to a job or anything. So there's always gonna be issues or things that occur, or maybe we're processing bank feed and we miss something, but nine out of 10 times luckily right now, right? Bank feed is not being great with the ai, so that will be a transaction that does stand out to me.
But I pull reports on a weekend basis. When we reconcile, we're reconciling [00:44:00] transactions that are missing vendors. We're trans, we're reconciling transactions that got booked maybe differently than in previous times. We're reconciling. Anything that was booked to cogs but didn't have a job assigned to it.
So we're not just reconciling any balances to the, of what's in QuickBooks to what the bank is showing us. We're diving in a little bit more to make sure we're capturing everything for the client.
Dan DeLong: Alright. And and you mentioned something, just it went away. I'm sorry. I.
Shanna Quinn: It was that I, I had
Dan DeLong: a follow up question and it just, it came in, it went out as soon as it came in.
Is there a tool or report that you use as Shanna's Bible of, job costing? For, Client X, you know what it Is Is it double? Is [00:45:00] it is there a report in QuickBooks that you start with,
Shanna Quinn: they were all custom reports in QuickBooks and then double was like, I could do that.
Actually we do that. It is a part of our month end closing process every single month. And I was like, sign me up. But yes, now it is because of double. I added on to those custom reports client we have, so we've got reports that auto pool that we programmed into double that will, if we've got, if we have a client that has four different companies and they all roll up underneath one, we know we need to, we need intercompany reconcile.
So we're able now to have that report auto generate and be a part of that month ending process. And it doesn't have to be a part of month end process because those things, like I said, we go in and we do reconciliations at week ending or week beginning, and those reports will still be [00:46:00] there.
They'll still provide you that information and then you, through your client portal, you can request receipts, all that. So it has been a game changer for us for sure.
Dan DeLong: I remember, what's, what? Slipped away. So you mentioned, I
Shanna Quinn: remember my memorable comment.
Dan DeLong: Yes. Transactions that don't have payees that's something that you do, to, double check.
Importance of Payees and Vendor Names
---
Dan DeLong: What is the importance of having a payee on every transaction. I can only imagine a, couple of the answers, but I wanna hear from your perspective.
Shanna Quinn: Obviously as a double check to make sure that we have, if it is a Home Depot and it doesn't have that vendor name, that means we didn't probably process it with the receipt and we likely process it directly through bank feed, which is not a bad thing, but it could mean that potentially.
It was processed on accident and therefore maybe not captured as it should [00:47:00] have been as a billable expense back to our client. We have vendor, I have vendor names in all of our clients for pretty much everything. Even in our account transfers, profit first transfers. 'cause we're a profit first firm.
So the allocations, they all have, I don't trans, we don't trans use the transfer function. We're not using the credit card, credit function. Everything is being booked so that it has that associated vendor name. To it, and it's all deposit and an expense in and out of accounts so that we're able to easily track.
And if we have to easily then able to modify it, how it's booked. From an account standpoint,
Dan DeLong: if you I think one of the side parts of that is do you, you gotta put a payee or a name on every transaction release. You should, what about things that, like [00:48:00] one-off transactions like when they go on travel for example, and they eat at a restaurant that they're never gonna eat to again.
What is the, is do you homogenize some of these vendors in order to do that, or do you just add 'em
Shanna Quinn: specifically? All restaurants are called restaurant vendors. All gas stations are called gas vendors. We've got clients that live in city. They're constantly having parking charge though. It's parking vendors.
And then all travel is just travel vendors, and it's either booked to a travel expense or to travel meals.
Dan DeLong: Because if they go, what's the difference if they go to Marriott or, Hilton. Or Hilton,
Shanna Quinn: I then you're, cheating on Hilton, but I get Marriott has,
Dan DeLong: Paris will be upset with you.
Oh gosh. But darn it. Alright.
Final Thoughts and Upcoming Events
---
Dan DeLong: Any [00:49:00] any final thoughts that you wanna add about, this topic of capturing costs the right way?
Shanna Quinn: No, I think it's just being thorough. I think that I guess I'll just put out there too that if you guys do have any individual questions on the setup process of these things that you're just looking for some information on, maybe you've got a client now that you have a sort of question that this might relate to I'm happy to answer some questions.
However, if it's through my email through the company or through the link here with the video.
Dan DeLong: Absolutely. So you can always ask questions in the comments and we'll be able to address them there if you don't mind a public answer. So don't put your client's p and l in the comments of their [00:50:00] otherwise.
It won't be won't be financially homogenized. Talking about the access to the machines I did put the QR code for the B four cg. Just remind everyone what that is and, how we are ultimately looking to work.
Shanna Quinn: Yes. Sorry, I was just the popup for the chat came up, Dan, and it says on their end it says, oh.
Like at the moment where I dropped out.
Dan DeLong: Yeah.
Shanna Quinn: Sorry, I got distracted. That was
Dan DeLong: really funny.
Shanna Quinn: It's also one of those ones that you're like, oh, again.
Dan DeLong: So talk about the B for CGE and, how that's coming along so far.
Shanna Quinn: Yes, I am so excited since the Intuit Connect. I think like other than getting to hang out [00:51:00] with Dan some more I got some, I had this, had some great introductions and from there it just grown. And so the number of individuals, I've had business owners to reach out regarding potential partnerships to be able to sort expand.
Network, expand the community, expanding resources for our accounting professionals and vice versa for trade business owners has just been so awesome. It's a, you could probably tell 'cause my voice is starting to give up. I've never talked this much like professionally in a really long time. Probably since I worked in an office last over 11 years ago.
But it's just been the the response has been really amazing and I'm super excited. It does mean that the hard, like big go live has been slightly delayed because of [00:52:00] the new stuff that I'm trying to get added onto our portals to make it so that all these new resources and discounts and stuff available.
Now to our accounting professionals can easily be linked between everybody. But we are looking at potentially a 12 one sort of soft go live where I'll be doing some enrollment for accounting professionals. And I'm really excited, I can't say the name yet 'cause we haven't officially signed a partnership agreement.
Between our two platforms, but I've got a really amazing CAS platform that reached out. So we're actually working on developing a firm level membership as well. So the other three platforms are specifically for independent accounting professionals. And then this one is going to be specifically for firm levels of small to medium so that we can join [00:53:00] forces and help train, firms staff on how to job costs, but also how to also offer those high level CAS services to them as well.
Dan DeLong: Excellent. Next week, or actually next week, we're not gonna be live, but there will be a live workshop. Shanna and I are gonna live, record it. And then we will replay it next week. So that's gonna be about the labor time and payroll mapping. If you have questions, no one's gonna answer them, but we will play it at our normal time.
So it will be, it will appear as if it's a live workshop, but it actually will be prerecorded.
Shanna Quinn: And hopefully no glitches.
Dan DeLong: Shana won't be leaving and coming back through the revolving door of what we have here.
Shanna Quinn: Terrible.
Dan DeLong: Yeah. [00:54:00] Appreciate you joining us today and we will look forward to seeing you live in a couple weeks. But look for us next week where we talk about labor time and payroll mapping in our continuing job costing series.
Hopefully everybody has a great week and a great Thanksgiving.
Shanna Quinn: Happy holidays everybody. Gobble,
[00:55:00]
