Job costing is central to construction accounting for its ability to track and allocate all associated costs for a specific job. When done right, it’s a powerful tool for understanding job-level profitability and is key to improving operational efficiency. However, to job cost effectively, you’ll need the right tools in place to help you track and organize large amounts of data.
Tools like QuickBooks Online, by Intuit, will help set the stage by automating crucial bookkeeping tasks, but bookkeeping alone isn’t enough. To get the full story of your finances, you’ll need a dedicated job costing tool that can work in tandem with your bookkeeping system. With a smooth integration between these two systems, you can find a healthy balance between efficient operations and stable finances.
In this article, we’ll help you sort through some of the best third-party job costing systems that integrate with QuickBooks Online. When choosing these apps, we looked for tools that provide the following:
- Comprehensive job costing capabilities
- Cost tracking for labor, materials, and equipment
- Real-time data reporting
- Budget tracking
- Synthesis (How well does the integration actually work with QuickBooks Online?)
- Ability to sync financial and operational reporting data
- Usability
- Ability to eliminate double-data entry
Now that we know the criteria, let’s take a look.
Contractor Foreman
Contractor Foreman bills itself as an all-in-one digital solution for construction project management. Aimed at mid-sized specialty and general contractors, ContractorForeman features time cards, estimating capabilities, online payments, daily logs, and scheduling tools.
Through its QuickBooks integration, contractors can improve billing information and workflows with built-in tracking capabilities to simplify day-to-day accounting functions, such as expense tracking and updating accounts receivable or accounts payable.
However, users have reported some difficulty in the setup process and general funcitonality. Depending on the size of your business or job costing process, the initial setup with their QuickBooks integration can take time and resources that may not be worth the effort. Additionally, the two systems don’t always agree on the formatting of data, so using specialized software might be necessary to clean up the data before importing.
CoConstruct
CoConstruct is a popular project management and job costing software amongst home building and remodeling contractors. Its integration with QuickBooks Online allows for a convenient transfer of financial information, such as payments, invoices, and expenses. This integration ensures that job costing data is accurately stored and organized within QuickBooks Online.
CoConstruct boasts a comprehensive reporting system. Enabling the creation of cost breakdowns for analyses on project profitability. However, this system can be complex for small to mid-sized contractors. Even more, if you’re outside of the homebuilding/remodeling space, their systems may not be flexible enough to accommodate the needs of your specific trade. Another downside is it’s only available for QuickBooks Online users at this time and must sync into an existing QuickBooks account.
ServiceTitan
ServiceTitan is a field service management system that offers a web-based solution for project managers in the construction space. It offers app functionality that brings most of its features to the job site. This includes scheduling, communication, invoicing, and payment processing. Service Titan helps with job costing by offering a suite of customizable tools that track and manage costs associated with individual jobs and other costs like safety and disposal.
Key features include the ability to track activity with advanced performance analysis in a reporting dashboard that breaks down job costs based on materials, equipment, and labor burden. Another big plus is that their QuickBooks Online integration automatically syncs data, reducing manual data entry.
However, ServiceTitan only offers a QuickBooks integration for the US version of QuickBooks Online Plus and QuickBooks Desktop Pro and higher, which may limit usage for many contractors. Additionally, the integration has a comparatively steep learning curve compared to other integrations.
Knowify
Knowify delivers a powerful job costing system to help contractors monitor job costs throughout the entire life cycle of a project. Through Knowify, you can track labor, materials, subcontractor, and equipment costs with a high level of accuracy. From there, you can easily set up budgets and track costs against those budgets for invaluable insight into efficiency and spending. We also help monitor the status of purchase orders, change orders, and other document management needs to help you quickly follow up on any issues that could affect deadlines.
With our real-time reporting capabilities, you’ll never have to guess where you stand on a job financially. You’ll have the ability to analyze performance with job-level precision. This helps you see where you perform well and where you can make improvements to boost profitability even more.
When it comes to our QuickBooks integration, we understand the importance of a bi-directional relationship between bookkeeping and job costing. The two systems must talk to each other and simplify, not complicate. This approach led us to create the most comprehensive integration with QuickBooks Online available on the market today.
Through our integration into QuickBooks, you’re able to enter information only once (in either system), which will automatically sync and display data in full detail in both systems. This way, you get the detailed job reporting of Knowify and the company wide financial reporting of QuickBooks Online. This relationship eliminates the problem of double data entry–mitigating extra work and errors. All combined, the structure of our integration with QuickBooks ensures your data is always ready and reliable when you need it most.
Even better, Knowify can sync to individual accounts and items on a line-by-line basis for both payables and receivables. This means that there is no degradation of data in QuickBooks Online. Further strengthening the application of your data.
ClockShark
ClockShark is a tracking and scheduling software built for local construction and field services. Their main features include a robust system for tracking employee time and running payroll. It delivers a fairly large number of integrations, outside of QuickBooks Online, including PayChex and Zapier. ClockShark helps with job costing by providing easy access to project data, including timesheets, job durations, labor costs, and revenue. This information helps to monitor project costs in real-time, identify which jobs are most profitable, anticipate or adjust for cost overruns, and help bill customers more accurately.
The downsides are that it requires a dedicated administrative resource to maintain the integration platform (on both ends). It also has limited compatibility with certain types of QuickBooks accounts, and the complexity of the customization options can impact the overall cost of the integration platform and its implementation.
RedTeam GO
RedTeamGo declares itself as an easy-to-use construction project management software. It’s mainly focused on project execution for small to mid-sized contractors. It’s job costing functionality helps to provide an in-depth view of how much a job has cost in time, resources, and materials by tracking the hours and costs associated with a job from start to finish. It also allows helps to accurately estimate the cost of future jobs and track actual costs to improve future estimates.
Additoinal advantages are seen through its ability to automatically integrate invoicing data between QuickBooks and the RedTeamGo CRM. This makes it easy to review billing information from their platform.
However, RedTeamGo’s specific integration can be difficult and time-consuming to configure, requiring users to have a solid understanding of both programs. Additionally, the synchronization between QuickBooks Online and RedTeamGo has been reported to run slow, meaning users must wait for updates to be reflected across both systems.
Procore
Procore delivers project management software that covers various solutions, including quality, safety, and financial management. Additional features include field service, takeoff, estimating, bidding, and scheduling. ProCore seeks to provide a single source for data entry, eliminating duplicate entries and the need for manual accounting transfers. With ProCore, users can track job costs in real-time and monitor progress to ensure budgets are optimized. It also offers a job cost dashboard to track the financials of all projects, with an integrated budgeting system, with invoicing and reporting capabilities.
However, it’s more expensive than other bookkeeping methods and requires a greater time investment for setup and tracking. It also doesn’t directly support other accounting software or tools, limiting the amount of flexibility and freedom provided by other integrations.
Jobber
Jobber focuses on the home service industry providing tools for scheduling, quotes, and invoicing. Main capabilities include the ability to track costs for materials, labor, and additional job expenses with a breakdown by job type or job category. Outside of tracking, Jobber provides profitability reports to help identify and bid on jobs that are most profitable to your business.
The integration is fairly straightforward, and once set up, you can sync different pieces of information to fit your time and labor tracking needs. However, it’s important to remember that Jobber and QuickBooks are very different systems. Synching between them can result in errors in regard to how your data is displayed. This can also cause conflicts with existing software or any third-party applications associated with your QuickBooks account.
Tradify
Tradify is a job management software solution built for trade and service businesses. It helps track and manage jobs with tools for handling quotes, invoicing, scheduling, and more. Tradify helps with job costing in a number of ways. It enables you to track the time and costs associated with each job, with a real-time view of job costs for visibility into the profitability of each job. Users enjoy a fully integrated mobile app with features like price lists, progress payments, and customer activity tracking with all job information accessible by field and office staff via mobile devices.
However, not all versions of QuickBooks are compatible with the Tradify platform, meaning users may not be able to integrate their data how they want to. Additionally, the initial setup cost and ongoing subscription fees of the Tradify QuickBooks integration may put it out of reach for some small business owners. Lastly, their QuickBooks integration doesn’t offer all the features available in the full Tradify solution.
Buildertrend
Buildertrend has become popular amongst residential construction management teams through its digital tools for tracking job costs, supplies, staff, and more. The software can provide real-time cost analysis and forecasting so that builders and contractors can monitor project costs and ensure that bids remain accurate and cost-effective. It also provides visibility into labor and material costs, giving users a better understanding of cost breakdowns for each project.
BuilderTrend improves job costing by automatically capturing project costs from integrated systems such as QuickBooks and QuickBooks Online. However, regarding their QuickBooks Online integration, there are limited customization options for tracking customer payments and setting payment terms. Additionally, some contractors may find limited reporting capabilities for analyzing job cost data, which can be a significant drawback for contractors with robust job costing systems.
Knowify QuickBooks integration
The relationship between job costing and bookkeeping boils down to finding a balance between operations and finances.
Knowify’s best-in-class QuickBooks Online integration means your cloud-based construction software will always be connected to your accounting software. Through this relationship, your bookkeeper, office manager, project manager, and owner can all stay on the same page.
To see how Knowify can integrate with your QuickBooks account plus many more features, schedule a 30-minute demo to learn how Knowify can transform your construction business.