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Classes and locations

A class is a line of business, a crew or a service - mowing, snow removal, irrigation. A location is a yard, a branch or a territory. Tag an expense, a bill, an invoice or a journal line with either, and the profit and loss can show one column per class or per location, or just the lines of one. QuickBooks sells this on its Plus tier as class and location tracking; here it comes with the books.

Classes and locations live under Books → Accounting → Classes and locations and are part of the native ledger - Growth and up. Adding, renaming and retiring values takes the accounting permission; anyone who can read reports can read the lists.

Setting them up

Open Books → Accounting → Classes and locations. There are two lists, one toggle between them. Add a value, rename it in place, reorder the list, and switch a value off to retire it: a retired value stays on everything it is already on and stops being offered on new work. A value can be deleted only while nothing names it - once a document or a journal line carries it, retire it instead.

Keep the lists short. Three to eight classes is what most crews can keep straight; a class per customer is what the customer column already does for you.

Tagging the work

Every value is optional, and the pickers appear only once your lists have something in them.

  • Expenses and bills carry a class and a location on the header - the whole document is one kind of work in one place. Pinning an expense to a job, or billing a bill line to one, prefills whichever slot is still empty from the job’s own defaults; your own pick always wins.
  • Invoices carry the pair on the header too. An invoice built from a job takes the job’s defaults; a batch invoice takes a value only when every job in the batch agrees.
  • Jobs carry the pair as books defaults: the invoices and expenses written against the job start with them.
  • Recurring templates - expenses, bills and invoices - carry the pair and copy it onto every occurrence. A value retired after the template was written is simply left off from then on; the schedule keeps running.
  • Journal lines take their own class and location, one line at a time. A reclass keeps the moved money’s tags; a copy keeps them as the new entry’s own picks. The CSV import under Books → Accounting → Journal → Import CSV takes optional Class and Location columns, matched by name against your active values - an unknown or retired name is a row error.

Every line of a posted document carries the document’s tags - the revenue or expense side and the cash or payable side alike - so a filtered or cut report foots.

The profit and loss by class or by location

Open Reports → Profit & Loss, then Customize. Under Columns, pick Classes or Locations: one column per value, biggest net income first, then Other past the twentieth and Unspecified for the lines with no tag; the Total column is the plain statement. Under Filter, pick one class or one location to read only those lines - every row and the net income follow the filter, and a drill into an account opens the register on the same lines. Both ride the URL, a saved view, a schedule and a report pack, and every download prints what the screen shows.

The General Ledger takes the same filter under Filter accounts, next to the account types, so an account’s register can show one class’s postings; its CSV and workbook download filtered.

Columns and filters by class or location read the accrual record: the cash projection re-times amounts per account and has no per-class equivalent, so on the cash basis they are held with a note. The balance sheet, the trial balance and the statement of cash flows take neither - a balance belongs to the business, not to a class. A budget is the whole business’s too, so Budget vs. Actuals takes no class or location filter.

QuickBooks

If the company syncs with QuickBooks, map each class to a QuickBooks Class and each location to a QuickBooks Department (what QuickBooks shows as a Location) from the QuickBooks card under Settings → Connect → Integrations. A pushed invoice, expense or bill then carries the class on every line and the location on the header; a value with no mapping is left off the push and noted in the sync log, never guessed. An import maps the other way - a purchase whose lines all carry one QuickBooks class lands here with the matching class, a document split across classes lands with none. If class or location tracking is off in the QuickBooks company, the card says so: QuickBooks ignores the refs until it is turned on there.

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