In desperate need of help!!!

[maxmiles]

My husband and I have just opened a new electrical contracting business. I have no experience in accounting except for the college courses I took 10 years ago. The business is starting out small and I feel like Peachtree Complete 2002 is way to in-depth. I am clueless as to where to even begin. There is noone in my area who can do on-site set up or training. I have 5 days left on my free customer support. But I don't even know what questions to ask. I hate to spend 1 billion dollars on extended peachtree support because we don't have the money. How can I find someone to help me? Any suggestions are appreciated. My biggest problem is entering inventory as we don't keep inventory, we buy what we need for each individual job from the wholesale house and that material goes directly to that job. But I still need to keep track for billing etc. purposes. That is only one of my problems. Thank you to anyone who has any ideas. I live in St. Joseph, Missouri and there seems to be noone around here who knows about Peachtree.

[dringstrom]

Start with a copy of Peachtree 8 for Dummies by Diane Koers and Elaine J. Marmel (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0764506404/accountingadviso). It's the book that I use for the Peachtree training classes that I offer periodically, and is a great beginners reference.

[Greg Lawrence]

I agree with you that Peachtree is way too in depth and requires some basic accounting knowledge to be useful. We are a small manufacturing business that at one time did not keep detailed inventory. We used a manual bookkeeping system for 2 years, QuickBooks for 8 years then switched to Peachtree when we wanted to go multi-user and keep a detailed inventory. The switch was (and still is) very painful because Peachtree, in my opinion, is much less user friendly than QuickBooks. Even with 10 years of bookkeeping experience and 6 hours of college accounting, Peachtree was very difficult for me to set up and is difficult to maintain. Maybe I need to take David's advice and read 'Peachtree 8.0 for Dummies'. Hopefully the book will help you get stuff sorted out. We don't use jobs and job costing but that Peachtree feature could be very useful for your business. I know this post isn't going to help much other than offer moral support to let you know you aren't the only one that has had difficulty with Peachtree. Good luck with your business, a year from now you will be a Peachtree wizard. I grew up in Fairfax, ever hear of it?

[maxmiles]

Thank you for your comments. I have Peachtree for dummies and the user's manual that came with the software, not helping. I am taking a summer Accounting course, hopefully I can get some help there!

[Diane Koers]

Don't forget this group is here to help you. You might look in your Yellow Pages under Computer Instruction and see if anyone mentions Peachtree. I'm in Indiana and that's how I advertise my support services. Also, if you want to contact me direct, I'll be glad to help as well. dkoers@comcast.net

[TAR]

Hang in there...Too much information at one time is always hard to digest. When I started with Peachtree 5 years ago, I felt the same...looking back, I would be at the same place today if I had just started out slower, one piece at a time, rather than trying to conquer it all at once. We use Peachtree in our contracting business also...Commercial Roofing..50 employees working in 2 states, etc. (our company is 102 years old) We do not attempt to run inventory on Peachtree, as it is not designed to handle our needs (our accountants agree). We buy a roll of metal for instance, and cut it any number of ways, with varying degrees of waste...there are just too many factors to make the inventory run smoothly...it's not like we're buying and selling shirts and shoes...they go in and come out the same. We DO keep close watch on jobcosting, however...In addition to actual jobs, we keep one active called "stock"...there we post misc. goods bought in bulk such as screws, nails and caulking...As each job runs along, our warehouse manager keeps a list of each item taken out of stock for a job, and also lists all material left over and returned to stock at the end of the job. We price these bits and pieces as accurately as possible, and make one entry at the end of each job to balance the jobcosting. Under tasks/purchases, we make one entry as if entering an invoice to the job, then on the next line (of the same invoice entry), we reverse the entry, showing a negative entry to the job named "stock". This creates a net 0 posting which does not affect accounts payable, keeps jobcosting accurate, and will keep track of whatever "inventory" is accumulated over the years (at least the cost). At the end of any period, the balance in this stock job should equal the cost of inventory increased or decreased over the year. Hope this helps...good luck!

[bluegal]

I have been running an electrical contracting business with Peachtree for many years. Let me know if you have specific questions and I'll try to help. I do use the job cost function, but don't try to enter material into inventory, too time-consuming. I have developed my own methods....:)

[Peachtree fan]

I have three different clients that are Electrical Contractors and have used Peachtree , Quickbooks Pro and Timberline( middle tier accounting program)
We never put detail of the material into the accounting programs. For service and smaller jobs we kept files with copies of the invoices for each job and billed detail by looking through the files. Most vendor invoices pertained to one job so we put the total invoice to a job in the software. If not we used mutiple lines for the invoice. For large items you can use the description field instead of inventory. For adjustments to jobs (or jobs to stock or stock to jobs) we did it through Adjusting Journal Entries.
I would like to hear arguments on this one(peachtree fan ) ,but I would recommend using Quickbooks for job costing. The reports in PT for job cost are not very good. In QB you can group, regroup and organize the jobs much better than PT and the reporting is more flexable. QB's problem is the Bank Rec's and the accounting reports.
In any case have someone familiar with accounting set you up and ask your questions here.
This isn't for you, but we have an interface for Timberline that brings in the cost (Union shop) for Payroll from the outside PR company to TL. I heard of
the same thing being done for PT.
Intuit has a program called Master Builder 7(just heard about it) but like TL your not in that leaque.

[RobinMc]

My husband and I own a small plumbing company and have been using PT for about 4 years now. I have a question about job costing. We have an Excel spreadsheet with formulas that helps us determine our breakeven cost per hour - includes all our overhead. I was thinking that to accurately get a correct job costing and to be able to show accurate profit or loss on a job, we should figure our overhead cost into each job? I know that you can charge actual labor expense through payroll, as well as materials, equipment etc to that job but there are so many "hidden"" factors that really more completely tell the story. Can anyone suggest anything??
Thanks a bunch!

[BentFranklin]

Here's what I did for my environmental contracting business. Your mileage may vary....

1. Get an accountant to set up a chart of accounts and initial balances for me. Decide on cash versus accrual accounting. The latter is more accurate and helps if you are getting bank loans or bonding.

2. Maintain an Excel spreadsheet of jobs assigning each job to a job number. Track every cost against those numbers from now on. I use job 1000 for general and administrative and 1001 and up for paying gigs.

3. Set up each job in Maintain->Job Costs->Jobs. Enter customers as needed to set up jobs.

4. When invoices come in assign each one to one or more jobs. Enter them in Tasks->Purchases. Set up vendors as you need them.

5. How you tracking labor costs depends on whether you use PT's time slips or not. We don't. We have each person complete time slips weekly identifying how much time they spent on each job number. We do this in Excel and we have a macro we run each week that opens all the timesheets and spits out a flat list of all the time spent that week. We append that to another spreadsheet that holds all the time records for an antire year and use this for billing.

6. For payroll, we use a spreadsheet that allocates each person's labor cost to whatever jobs they worked on. Then when we do paychecks, there is a button to enter all the costs.

7. We pay vendors using Tasks->Payments or Tasks->Select for Payment.

8. Miscellaneous transactions are entered using the General Journal.

9. At year end we have our accountants review everything and tell us what to enter for depreciation, over/underbilling etc.

I hope this helps.

[P Brusch]

To address just the overhead question -
How about a GL account (and a cost code) called "allocated overhead" or something similar, placed near the end of your expense accounts.

You'll need to determine the overhead for a given period (month or whatever) and a method for allocating it to jobs. Total hours of labor is one such method, but choose based on your own situation. Use a spreadsheet to determine how much overhead to apply to each job, then make a general journal entry with a line to debit each job and then one to credit the GL account, but with no job. You'll have a net transaction of -0- in the GL account, but costs in the jobs.

[BentFranklin]

Typically one does not allocate overhead to jobs. That woudl throw off your gross profit and job profitability calculations. Revenue less cost of sales equals gross profit. Gross profit less overhead equals net profit.

[RobinMc]

Lord, I hate to sound like a dummy here, but in that instance - if I wanted to determine my net profit monthly:
I would allocate real costs to the job to get the job profitability and then at the end of the month, I could run an overall net profit on JOBS ONLY???? and subtract my estimated monthly overhead?

[JScottU]

I'm no expert. But my first bit of advice is that if you are going to use ANY computer accounting system...first you should have a least TWO computers with the program installed on each. Then practice "backing up" your data (as explained in the instructions) and transfering it from one computer to the other.

If you don't do this then you are BEGGING for trouble. You should back up your data often (how often depends on how much trouble it would be to go back and enter everything you typed since the last backup).

I agree with above posts that tracking inventory should not be done...especially if you are just staring out.

[JScottU]

Another great way to learn is to go to the "sample company" and play with it...use it practice with it....you can learn a lot.

[JScottU]

And finally, you don't have to use ALL of the features of an accounting program...such as payroll, inventory...you could start out hiring some service to do payroll and then take over that function later when you feel comfortable.