Sure, QuickBooks is great, but take a look at why the Jonas Premier Integrated Construction Software Solution is so much better. After all, they offer Customer Support in house.

JOB COSTING

QuickBooks:

• Only has cost items, which means every cost item must be linked to a General Ledger account rather than group by Cost Type and then linked to a General Ledger account, thus creating more work during the set-up of a cost item.
• Documents such as drawings, or contracts used in the course of Project Management work can be uploaded to QuickBooks but have to be attached to a specific customer or a specific estimate rather than storing all relevant documents to a particular job. Unlike Jonas Premier which allows for all Job related documents to be stored together with the Job information.
• QuickBooks can provide basic job cost reports such as Profit or Loss by job, but lacks when it comes to complex job costing reporting such as Payment application reports which can be found in Jonas Premier.

Jonas Premier:

• Allows for 5 levels of job costing, which provides a variety of useful options for the categorization of costs for both Accounting and Project Management Teams. This provides more versatile reporting options in both business segments allowing users to organize jobs by cost items, cost types, departments and even location.
• Can be configured to set up job specific markups, whereas QuickBooks requires a new “item” for every markup that a user may want to apply which makes billing cumbersome.
• Keeps the job costing and project management a separate functioning and reporting segment for Project Managers which allows them full use of the software without risking the integrity or confidentiality of the financial information also stored in Jonas Premier on the Accounting side of the product.

CREATING ESTIMATES

QuickBooks:

• Creating estimates involves creating a new “item” for every cost item a user needs to track. Each “item” is then linked to an account on the Chart of Accounts.
• These items need to be manually inputted during the creation of the estimate.
• QuickBooks has the ability to import an item list from excel, however, the templates are not readily available to users, and must be created by the user. Unfortunately the creation of the template and subsequent import is not very seamless and therefore is not used as often.
• The excel import that QuickBooks has available is only offered on their desktop version of the product, not on their cloud version, unlike Jonas Premier which has an excel upload that is easy to use and readily available on the cloud format.

Jonas Premier:

• Premier offers two options in terms of creating an estimate. The first is to upload an estimate from Excel using a template provided by the Jonas Premier Support Team. This template is easy to use and allows for the application of various mathematical functions while remaining in an easy to read format that can be uploaded with a click of a few buttons.
• The second option is to manually enter the costs while pulling the cost items from an existing drop down menu which would have been previously loaded into Premier using the aforementioned Excel upload template. While this option is similar to QuickBooks, the difference is the ease in which Jonas Premier allows users to upload their template of cost items.

WORKFLOW

QuickBooks:

• QuickBooks offers a workflow in terms of applications available for use, Purchase Orders, Receive Inventory and Enter Bills. However where workflow in QuickBooks lacks is the ability to set approvals and also require sign offs in order to make a purchase or record an invoice.

Jonas Premier:

• Jonas Premier allows for the System Administrators to set up a workflow requiring approvals at various checkpoints throughout the Accounts Payable process which helps to maintain the integrity of the data by reducing the amount of errors or unapproved transactions going through the accounting or job cost software.