QuickBooks for a One-Truck Shop: The Minimum That Works

Start with one bank account and one card, used only for the business. Every dollar in and out of the shop goes through them.

Mixing personal and business spending turns a 1-hour monthly habit into a lost weekend in April. It is also the first thing an accountant or a lender asks about.

If the tool you quote and invoice with connects to QuickBooks, connect it. Then each invoice and each payment posts as it happens. Nobody types an invoice twice, and your customer list builds itself.

Check the connection once:

• Send an invoice: then open QuickBooks and find it.
• Take a payment: it should show against that invoice.
• Check the customer: they should be in your customer list.

If the invoice is there but the payment is not, the connection is only half done.

QuickBooks groups your sales by the product or service on each invoice line. Three or four names are enough: Service, Installation, Materials, and maybe Maintenance.

That gives you a sales report that tells you something. A name for each of 300 price-book items tells you nothing. Set the accounting name once for each category in your price book, and let the sync use it.

QuickBooks is the ledger, not the job board. Customers, quotes, schedules, photos and notes live in whatever runs your work. QuickBooks gets the invoices and the payments, and nothing else.

Owners who run the day out of their books end up with two half-kept systems. Then the bookkeeper cannot tell which one is true.

The test is simple. If you would not show it to your accountant, it does not belong in QuickBooks.

Take a photo of every supplier receipt at the counter. Attach it to the expense in QuickBooks, or in its receipt app, before it goes in the door pocket. The paper is gone in a week. The photo is still there in April.

Sort each one as you go: materials, fuel, tools, subs or insurance.

Tag the materials you buy for one job with that customer's name. In April the question is rarely what you spent on materials. It is whether that roof made money.

The sales tax you collect is not your money. It belongs in a liability account, the place for money you owe, not in your sales.

Then the tax you owe is a number you can read off your books. If your invoicing tool posts the tax that way, leave it alone. If it lands in income, fix that before the first quarter closes.

Once a month, do these 5 things:

• Reconcile: match every bank and card line in QuickBooks, with nothing left unsorted.
• Chase late invoices: check the aged receivables report, and chase anything over 30 days.
• Check your mix: look at sales by item, and ask if it is what you expected.
• Set aside tax: move the estimated tax every month. Your accountant gives you the percent.
• File receipts: attach any receipt photos that are still loose.

That is the whole job. The year-end, the 1099s for subs and the tax return are your accountant's. They go fast when the monthly hour was done.