Department/Activities

The Depts & Activities tab in the Job screen shows all departments and activities that are part of this job. Departments let you indicate which areas of your business are associated with a job. You can associate as many departments as you wish with each job, both production and non-production departments, and you can add additional depts/activities, update the status of existing depts/activities, change due dates, and so on.

Adding Departments: Click Add Department. This is explained in detail in adding departments/activities.

Changing a Department’s Status (Pending/Active/Completed): You can change a department’s status in any of these ways:

• Click the Activate Department or Complete Department button. Which button you see depends on the department’s current status. (This assumes the current date/time is when the change was made, but you can edit the date if needed.)
• Fill in a blank start date to activate a department date, or fill in a completion date to complete the department.
• Click the Status column, click the drop-down, and choose the new status.
• Right-click the department and choose the appropriate status.
• Right-click the department and choose the appropriate status.

Changing a Start/Due/Completion Date: Click the corresponding date in the grid.

Terminating/Deleting a Department: Click the Terminate or Delete Department button. Delete if the department never should have been on this job in the first place; terminate it if it was supposed to be part of the job and then someone cancelled it. For example, if you added Construction to a job and then realized that you meant to pick Commercial Cleaning, you’d just delete Construction because it never should have been there. On the other hand, if you add Construction and then the customer calls and cancels the job, you’d terminate the department: you aren’t removing it because of a data entry error but because the customer cancelled. Over time, this distinction will help you to track how much work is being cancelled.

Seeing Deleted Departments: Click the drop down at the top right of the department list from Current to Deleted.

Using Accounting to Track Whether a Job is Billed: We recommend associating Accounting with every job. Initially you’d leave Accounting pending, and you’d make it active when work was ready to be billed. This way, the billing person can find all jobs that need billing by generating a list of jobs with active accounting departments. Once the job is billed (invoice entered in Quickbooks), that person would mark Accounting complete. The Collections manager takes over tracking the job after billing.