QuickBooks Question

[Corduroy Frog]

I'm not the biggest fan of QuickBooks, but if you work in today's small business accounting arena, you must encounter QuickBooks from time to time.

Have a customer who has been on QuickBooks several years now. He is a remodeling contractor, and contracts some 30 jobs per year, ranging from $150 to $40,000. The job order module is at the heart of his information system. He spends more time reading job reports and leaves the tax headaches to me.

Over the years, he has amassed an ever-growing job base of some 250 jobs. Every time I print out his "job profitability" detail reports, I have to first run a summary report for all of these 250 jobs, figure out which ones are old, and then pick & choose the others to run one job at a time.

When these jobs are completed, it would be nice to "retire" or "archive" these records so we won't have to wade through old jobs every time we want data on recent jobs. There is a feature which "inactivates" the jobs, but this just eliminates them from the hotkeys and does nothing to whittle down the reports.

Question: Is there a way to retire this old job data such that it is not in the way every time we want to access reports for newer jobs?

Thanks in advance,

The Frog

[JAinNC]

Try this

At the top tool bar of QB click "lists". See if you can find "jobs" or "Customer jobs" When you find the list double right click into each one on the list that you want to make "inactive".
This way you can still see the inactive jobs in the list but you will run the report and it will show the active jobs.
Good luck
Jeannie

[abby]

Look for...

In Help, look at Clean Up Your Data - in the Index. After several years it sometimes becomes necessary to get rid of the detail = QB will consolidate data before your chosen closing date into a summary entry for totals. It requires you to make a backup first to archive the detail and there are some other choices involved.

I've never used it for a client with job detail, so I can't vouch for what it will do on that score, but have used it on truly large unweildy databases that had endless transactions each year.

[geekgirldany]

Over the years, he has amassed an ever-growing job base of some 250 jobs. Every time I print out his "job profitability" detail reports, I have to first run a summary report for all of these 250 jobs, figure out which ones are old, and then pick & choose the others to run one job at a time.

How interesting. I have never tried this but you would think after a job was marked either inactive or completed it would not show up on reports any longer. Well I found this in the QBs Forum. I hope this helps.

Filtering reports for active jobs
Make sure your inactive jobs (or customers, for customers without jobs) are marked as inactive.

To mark a job as inactive, check the Job is inactive box on the Edit Job window, then click OK.

On the report, click Modify Report.

On the Filters tab of the Modify Report window, choose the Name filter.

Click the Name drop-down arrow and click Multiple names.

In the Select Name window, select all the names in the scrolling list. Click the first name, hold down the mouse button, and drag the mouse down through the entire list.

Only active names appear in the list, so this will select all your active names but exclude your inactive names.

Click OK. The report now shows only your active customers and jobs.

Important: If you memorize this report for future use, it will not include any customers or jobs that you have added since the report was last modified.

[Corduroy Frog]

Good Answers

Good answers, and a big Frog "Thank you" to all.

I do know that marking jobs "inactive" alone won't do it. I'm thinking the report filter might be the best thing to try. User-prompted archive operations sounds good too, but is scary to computer-challenged people such as myself.

Thank you - keep the cards and letters coming!