QuickBooks for Engineers - Setting Up Estimated Costs and Revenues

Don't forget that QuickBooks Online integrates seamlessly with BQE Core, the award-winning project accounting platform built for professional services firms. Core offers business intelligence, project management, time and expense tracking, billing, accounting, and reporting together in one intuitive package. You can integrate Core with QuickBooks, or handle your accounting within Core so it's right alongside all of your other essential business processes.

Now that the layout of your engineering project budget is done, it’s time to start putting in the numbers. This is very easy to do, but it’s important that you realize you are entering the cost and revenues. When you get to the “Rate” column (this will make perfect sense when you watch the video), the rate you are entering is based on what you PAY (i.e., your cost) for that line item. Once you have the rate set up, the “amount” is the amount of your cost. If you do nothing more, the estimate will assume that you are charging the client your cost for that line item. You have to enter either the markup amount or percentage, or go directly into the total column and key the total that you want to charge. Then QuickBooks will back into the markup amount for you based on what you enter as the total.

Once you understand this, you can easily fill out the rest of your budget. After that, the only thing left to show you is how to get the actual costs in there and track by item so you can get the reporting you want out of QuickBooks.