Tracking services performed by an owner or partner

Because owners and partners do not submit bills, the costs of the services they perform will not be part of the overall costs of the job unless you enter a transaction to account for the work. If you want owner or partner time to contribute to the job costs on reports such as job profitability or job estimates vs. actuals, here's what to do.

To track services performed by an owner or partner:

  1. Set up the owner or partner on the Other Names list. Other Names is the best list to use, since an owner or partner is not an employee, vendor, or customer.
  2. Create a new service item to represent the work done by the owner or partner:
  3. To make the work of an owner or partner billable, enter their time on either a weekly timesheet or single activity record:
  4. To invoice a customer for the owner's or partner's work, click Time/Costs when you are writing the invoice. In the Choose Billable Time and Costs window, click the Time tab. Then select the work that you want to appear on the invoice.
  5. To make owner and partner time part of the job costs on reports but not affect the profit and loss statement, write a zero-amount check as follows:

If you have not yet invoiced the customer

Be careful not to invoice the customer twice for the same work. When you go to the Choose Billable Time and Costs window, you'll see the cost both on the Time tab (because you entered the time and made it billable) and on the Items tab (because you associated the service item with a Customer:Job when you wrote the zero-amount check). Mark ONLY the work shown on the Time tab. To avoid confusion, we recommend that you click in the Hide column to remove the service item entry from the Items tab.

What you'll see in your reports

After you record the zero-amount check, the cost (as shown on the Items tab in the Choose Billable Time and Costs window) appears on all job and item reports that show costs by job or item. On the other hand, the cost does not appear as an expense on a profit and loss statement because it is not assigned to an expense account.