Recently I wrote about Quicken and QuickBooks and the tremendous following these personal finance and accounting programs have among contractors and subs. The popularity of this software is no mystery: Both programs are easy to understand, painless to set up, fun to use, and inexpensive. Instead of looking at the familiar territory covered by most off-the-shelf accounting programs — accounts receivable, accounts payable, balance sheets, and income statements — I want to focus on QuickBooks's ability to track labor, materials, and subcontractor costs on a per-job basis. This is commonly known as "job costing" and is probably the most important report a contractor needs in his dayto- day business operations. As an oldtimer once put it, "If your outflow is greater
