QuickBooks Premier Professional Services Edition Review 2023

The Professional menu in your Professional Services Edition dashboard gives you access to features that are most relevant to professional service companies. These include invoicing, proposal management, weekly timesheets, project costing, and professional service-specific reports.

Professional menu in QuickBooks Premier Professional Services Edition

In addition to estimates, you can create proposals. You can access the proposal form from the Professional menu on your dashboard. To complete the form, you need to enter details about the product or service you wish to provide, such as class, rate, amount, markup, and total.

Create a proposal in QuickBooks Premier Professional Services

You can set any number of billing rate levels and apply them to whichever employees you choose. For example, in a legal firm, you might want to set different billing rates for partners, paralegals, law associates, and outside consultants.

You can also set fixed or custom hourly rates by service item and assign them to employees. Then, every time you create an invoice, QuickBooks Desktop will provide the rate of each item automatically based on the assigned employee.

You can choose from the two billing rate types in QuickBooks Premier Professional Services:

1. Fixed Hourly Rate: This applies a fixed hourly rate to an employee, which can be set in the Hourly Rate field.
2. Custom Hourly Rate Per Service Item: Use this billing type when employees are billed at different rates based on the service being performed.

Set up bill rate level in QuickBooks Premier Professional Services

You can set a per-hour price level and assign it to particular types of work. For example, you can create a service item for lawn care and set a price level of $50 per hour, regardless of which employee performs the service.

Also, you can set special price levels to be applied to particular customers. For instance, you can set a friends and family special price level equal to 90% of the standard rate for all services. After assigning the friends and family rate to the desired customers, it would be used automatically when an invoice is calculated.

Set new price level in QuickBooks Premier Professional Services

You can batch-create invoices for unbilled time and expenses. QuickBooks will provide a screen showing all unbilled time, expenses, and mileage by job. You can select the clients you want to bill, and invoices will be generated automatically. You can also choose to select a single job and view the detail of unbilled time and expenses to bill only a portion.

Invoice for time and expenses in QuickBooks Premier Professional Services

You can enter employee time in a weekly timesheet and assign it to a particular service code and customer job. Nonbillable time can be assigned to a nonbillable service item. The timesheet entry isn’t only used to accumulate hours to bill but also to calculate an hourly employee’s paycheck if you’ve subscribed to QuickBooks Payroll. Hours entered for salaried employees won’t affect their paychecks.

Weekly timesheet in QuickBooks Premier Professional Services

Project costing in QuickBooks Premier Professional Services Edition allows you to track the expenses for a project and compare them to your revenue, giving you an idea of how much you make and spend for each project. An important feature unavailable in QuickBooks Online, the cloud-based version, is the ability to compare job estimates and actual expenses.

Sample report on job estimates vs actual expenses

While Professional Services Edition includes all the traditional financial reports of QuickBooks Premier, it also has a list of reports that help track your billable expenses to ensure they eventually get assigned and billed to a customer or project.

• Expenses not Assigned to Projects: You can refer to this list to find expenses that haven’t been assigned to customer jobs.

Sample report on Expenses not Assigned to Projects

• Unbilled Expenses by Project: This will provide a list of expenses that have been assigned to a customer’s job but not yet billed to the customer on an invoice.

Sample report on Unbilled Expenses by Project

• Billed vs. Proposal by Project: This compares the proposed fee for a customer job to the amount that has already been billed. You can refer to this report to determine if additional unbilled time and expenses should be billed.

Sample Billed vs. Proposal by Project report

• Billed and unbilled hours by employee and project: Here, you’ll find a list of hours that have been charged by employees to a customer’s job but haven’t been billed to the customer.
• Actual project costs detail: You can analyze this report to determine the actual cost incurred on a customer job. This is different from the amounts billed for a job. For example, while you might bill a customer $100 per hour for a particular employee, the actual project cost report will only show the amount you paid the employee, such as $25 per hour.