Transitioning from Customer to Job-Based Accounting

Before Chronicle and QuickBooks are linked, most of our users use customer-based accounting, that is, in QuickBooks, invoices, payments, etc., are entered directly for the customer without creating a job. However, once Chronicle starts sharing information with QuickBooks, it expects information to be associated with jobs, so when you add a customer in Chronicle, it adds both customer and job in QuickBooks.

Once Chronicle is linked to QuickBooks, you’ll want to make sure that you start associating information with jobs rather than just with the customer; see page 25 for more detail.

In making the transition from customer to job-based accounting, some users don’t want to bother adjusting their old information in QuickBooks; they leave the old information as it is and just begin entering new information for jobs. This is perfectly acceptable, and, for those with a few thousand customers in QuickBooks, it may be the most practical.

Other users want their information in a consistent format, so if new information in QuickBooks is all going to be associated with jobs, they want their old information associated with jobs as well. While this isn’t required, if you want to, here’s how to associate existing information with a job; you’d do this for each existing customer that doesn’t already have jobs:

Converting old customer accounting info to jobs

1. In QuickBooks, click the List menu, and then click Customer:Job List.
   ctrl-J is the shortcut key to bring the Customer:Job List up.
2. On the Customer:Job List, double-click the customer to convert old information to a job for.
   
   This takes you to the customer’s information.
3. Click the Job Info tab.
   
4. On the Job Info tab, change any piece of information.
   It doesn’t matter what you change there as long as you change something. For example, you could change the Job Status to Closed, you could type an “x” in the Job Description, you could choose an end date or job type, etc.
5. Click OK to save the change.
   This takes you back to the Customer:Job List.
6. At the bottom of the screen, click the Customer:Job button, and then click Add Job.
   
   We’re not really going to add a new job at this point (we’ll let Chronicle add new jobs as needed), but this forces QuickBooks to convert the existing information to a job.
7. QuickBooks asks you to confirm that you want to convert existing information to a job; click OK to continue.
   
8. QuickBooks shows a New Job screen; click Cancel since we don’t really want to add a new job now.
   You’ll be returned to the job list, and the information for the previous work will be listed as Job 1.
   
9. If you want to change the name, just double-click the job, enter the new name, and then click OK.

When you do this, once in a while, a payment and invoice get disassociated (no other information about the payment or invoice is lost). If you go from a zero balance to the full balance showing up again, go to Receive Payment and apply the payment to the invoice again.