Using Job/Project in H&B

I don't see what you might have seen to give you the impression that the Project/Job facilities would track time at all. It would be extremely nice but AFAICT that's not what it does.

Going to Help and searching for "project" the first entry on the list is:

Creating and tracking projects and jobs

Projects and jobs are _a convenient way to track related income and expenses_. Though you don't need to assign a business form to a project/job (Quicken tracks the form for you by customer anyway), we recommend using projects/jobs; if you have multiple projects underway with a single customer, you can track each project separately.

In Quicken, a project/job consists of one or more transactions with a particular customer. The transactions could be any business-related transactions---estimates, invoices, payments, credit memos, even bills for reimbursable expenses.

Noticeably absent is any mention of time. As such what made you thought that it would track time? (The only time I see tracked is in the beginning and end dates of the project).

Andrew,

I should have been clearer on the "Time" point -- although I keep track of my time, in the end it's dollars since I bill my time at a flat per hour rate. So I pretty much treat labor time and dollars as interchangeable.

So would this be considered job related income? Or is it an expense? And if so, how would I go about tracking it in my case?

Join the club! I bill my time at a flat per hour rate too.

If you wish to think of it that way then fine. It doesn't change the fact that Quicken H&B is not designed to track billable hours.

Would what be considered job related income? Your time? No it would not be treated as job related income. Job related income is $$$ that come in for work performed. Now you may bill be the hour but again Quicken H&B does not track hours. You can invoice and when you do there are fields for *Quantity* and *Rate*. And you could consider and enter hours for

*Quantity* and $/hour for *Rate*. In fact that is what I do. However, aside from that, there is no tracking of billable time. Quicken H&B is trying to fit business people who bill by hour as well as those who don't. That's way it says "Quantity" instead of "Hours".

Is what an expense? Your time? Only really in the sense as you "spent" your time doing "X" where you could of "spent" your time doing "Y".

Again, Quicken H&B does not track time. Damn even the help says it doesn't. So stop thinking that way. You keep track of your time using some other mechanism. For example, in my computer consulting business I bill per hour, much like you. And I must fill out this thing called timesheets for the client. This timesheets detail and track the hours I work per week. The client pays based on the timesheet but I bill differently. So while the client may pay for 2 weeks of work based on the timesheets for those two weeks I bill (i.e. invoice with Quicken H&B on the 15th and the last day of the month. That's the way it works.

OK -- I'll keep using those slips of paper. I just wanted to be sure that I wasn't missing some aspect of the Job/Project feature that would eliminate them.