An Austin, Texas master carpenter/builder and certified remodeler talks about QuickBooks

I had the great fortune of meeting Doug Marsh recently and, in the course of our conversation he mentioned that he had used QuickBooks for many years and considered it an essential tool for contractors to manage their business.

Doug, a certified remodeler and certified aging in place specialist, has been a master carpenter/builder for 30 years who, with his partner Chuck Vorspans who has a Masters degree in architecture, design, build, and remodel fine homes in Austin, Texas.  I asked him to pass on his own story to other contractors.

I moved to Austin in 1984 and jumped into the construction scene as a trained carpenter with 11 years experience.  In 1994 I started to feel that I could move up into being a General Contractor. I incorporated in 1995 and launched  my General Contracting corporation, opened a new bank account and went to work. One of my subcontractors at the time told me that he was entering his financial data into QuickBooks and then printing his checks. This greatly interested me because, at the time, I was carrying a large checkbook and really had no way to keep track of anything other than the check registry. Another friend of mine, who was a General Contractor as well, was already using QuickBooks in his business.

I took the plunge and bought the software and asked my friend to help teach me the basics of the program. He taught me how to use items and to set up vendors and customer/jobs. The beauty of QuickBooks is that anyone, without experience, can launch basic accounting and record keeping without any accounting experience what so ever. In a very short time I was ordering checks from Intuit, the maker of QuickBooks, and printing checks.

The trick with the program is to get instruction at the start so you don’t go down the wrong road for your situation. In my company I had no inventory which made everything much easier and because you have to record payments, deposits, estimates somewhere and somehow you might as well enter it into a program. Once you make the move you find out how well the program sorts out all the data and allows the user to pull up every kind of report about your data that you might need.  For General Contractors it is the perfect system.

Since 2000 I have had another company which is much bigger than my former company. We opened a new company in QuickBooks and have used the program to great advantage. We set up budgets and give all the records to our accountant at tax time and, because of the universality of QuickBooks, most accountants have the program so they can properly serve all their clients that use the program. The most important use for us is the report called Job Estimates vs Actuals which is how we track and account for all our job costing data so we know how we are doing per project. All the data is spread through all areas of the Company and therefore gives us a complete Company financial picture on any given date. Quick Books is an absolutely critical component of the success of our company and we could not manage without it.

For those who might want to know more about Doug, his website is www.marshvorspan.com.

Robert Guild is certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor in Austin, TX who conducts CPE courses for CPAs and individual training and group classes to QuickBooks users.  His company Accounting Insight maintains a sixteen station QuickBooks lab, providing hands on training.  You can contact him directly at rguild@accountinginsight.biz or follow him on twitter at QBPro