Is This Your Situation: Figuring out Tracking in QuickBooks
What is a class? When you use the class feature in QuickBooks, in addition to the item or account, you can also specify a class to a transaction. As an example, let’s say you service and sell appliances. Perhaps you want to track the profitability of your service department versus your retail operation. By using classes, you can link each transaction to the service or the retail department (class in QuickBooks) and then view or filter for the profitability of each. See Figure 1, below.
if necessary, you can even allocate a single transaction with multiple lines in the detail area to multiple classes. See Figure 2, below.
Class tracking is available in all QuickBooks desktop versions and the QuickBooks Online Plus subscription. Location tracking is available only in QuickBooks Online Plus.
What is a Location?
With QuickBooks Online, you can track locations in addition to, or instead of, using classes. So what’s the difference? With class tracking, you can assign a class to each line or row of a transaction. With location tracking, only one location per transaction is allowed. In our previous example, perhaps you opened a second retail or service location. Now you want to track the profitability of each location in addition to the profitability of each department overall. By using a combination of location and class tracking, you can slice and dice your data in lots of different ways. See Figure 3, below.
You can even customize your screens to refer to your locations as:
- Location (default)
- Business
- Department
- Division
- Property
- Store
- Territory
And, you can customize customer interactions by location, by specifying unique company contact info on sales forms. See Figure 4, below.
The devil is in the details of a business’s operations. With all kinds of built in reports and tools, you can dig deep and start tracking it all with locations and classes! If you need help setting this up, click here to contact our office.