Associating Transactions to Customers/Jobs

It depends on the type of transaction. If a check or a CC charge or deposit or other type of transaction that will accept a customer on the 'source' row, then you can. For example, you can write a check to a Customer:Job and use the same Customer:Job on the detail rows.

Hi @BigRedConsulting, thanks so much for your response. Can you send a screenshot of the source row you are referring to? I can't find it myself.

It depends on the type of transaction. The source row for a check is the payee row with the check total - the accounting row that uses the bank account. For a CC charge it's also the payee/total row.

@BigRedConsulting I don't see any payee/total row for this check transaction?

There was no image attached, but every check has a payee, so I'm not sure what you're asking.

Every transaction in QuickBooks has a special "source" row, the first row of the transaction, where it is conceptually recorded. For banking transactions like checks and deposits, that source row uses the bank account and includes the amount that the banking transaction impacts the bank. The other rows are detail rows.

So, while from a pure accounting viewpoint, each accounting row is the same, a debit or a credit, the source row is special in many cases - such as for reporting.

You can see which row is the source row using a Journal report, from the Accountant reports menu.  On the Journal report, the source row is always listed first, followed by all of the other accounting details.

I see what you're saying. I wish there was a way to associate an entire transaction to a job while keeping the payee field intact. For example, if I went to home depot for John Doe's job, I would like to keep the payee of the transaction as home depot while associating the entire transactional receipt to John Doe.

Unfortunately QuickBooks won't do that.

I've never (in 20 years) heard of anyone asking for this. How would it be useful?

So I could associate a home depot receipt to a job, not just an item on the receipt.

I don't see the functional difference.  How would that make reporting better?

In any case, in the QB model, the purchase is associated with Home Depot, the company you paid, and the detailed line items of the purchase are associated with a Job - and can also easily be associated with more than one job.

If a home depot receipt is for an entire job, it is 10x easier to associate the receipt as a whole to the job rather than needing to manually add each item and associate it to the job.

Oh, I see.  So it sounds like what you want is a way to auto-assign all the detail lines of a purchase to one job. It would be sort of like when you assign all invoice line items to a class by picking the class at the top of the invoice.

I expect this would be helpful if you were tracking many detail lines on a receipt.

I would also like to do this. I want to track expenses for each customer.

Thanks for getting involved with this thread, RBLoom.

You can associate transactions to customers/jobs by selecting the appropriate Customer:Job when creating/editing transactions.

I can certainly understand how an ability to associate transactions with jobs while keeping their Payee field intact could be useful and have submitted a suggestion about it as of today.

You can also submit your own feature requests while signed in.

Here's how:

1. In the top menu bar, go to Help, Send Feedback Online, then Product Suggestion....
   
2. Choose a Type of Feedback and Product Area (optional) from your available drop-down menus.
   
3. Enter any suggestions/feedback in the Here is my suggestion: field.
   
4. If you'd like, include your name/email in the My name is: (optional) and My e-mail address is: (optional) fields.
   
5. Select Send Feedback.
   

Your feedback's definitely valuable to Intuit. It will be reviewed by our Product Development team and considered in future updates. You can stay up-to-date with the latest news about your product by reviewing Intuit's Product Updates webpage.

You also have the option of checking our QuickBooks App Store for apps which may be able to help you achieve what you're looking to do.

I've also included a detailed resource about tracking job expenses which may come in handy moving forward: Track job costs

Please don't hesitate to send a reply if there's any questions. Have a lovely day!

@ZackE  RE: I can certainly understand how an ability to associate transactions with jobs while keeping their Payee field intact could be useful and have submitted a suggestion about it as of today.

So useful, in fact, that QuickBooks already does this and always has, for nearly 30 years. Why do you think it doesn't?

You were able to do this on the QuickBooks desktop, but then again the last time I used QuickBooks desktop was back in 2018 so I am not sure if they even still do this for the desktop version. Maybe its just QuickBooks online that doesn't allow it?