It would be a lot easier if everything went as planned but the world tends to be a lot messier than that. Unforseen events occur that require adjustments and customers sometimes change their minds about what they want to be done. This requires that QuickBooks be flexible enough to handle change orders to estimates.
All you have to do is open a previous estimate for a job and make your changes. When you sabve the modified estimate QuickBooks keeps track of the changes and inserts a note indicating modifications to the original estimate. You can even modify the change note to add additional information. This allows you to easily provide a change document to be signed by the customer as changes occur.
Here’s how it works. Below we have pulled up a previous estimate and added an interior door kit.
When we save the estimate a note window is displayed showing information about the change as shown below.
We can then print or email the document for sifnature by the customer
Also, notice that we can create purchase orders, sales orders, and invoices from the estimate screen.
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
