Q - I have a new client who is a sole proprietor, a literary
agent with 20 clients (writers) each having several books. The
books are sold to publishers and/or optioned by movie companies.
A contract price for a book can be paid over several months,
depending on the deal. So she would like to track her
clients/their projects and money paid and owed. All the money
comes in to her and she in turn pays out royalties to the writers
and at times commissions to managers. Could you tell me how you
would set this up?


A – A couple things come to mind immediately: keeping track of
the deals by job, potentially using the class feature, and the
unpaid bills by job report available in the Premier: Contractor
and Accountant Edition products.

Customer:Job List

For starters, I would use the customer:job list to track the
customer (i.e. writer) and the individual jobs (i.e. book or
movie deals). This will result in a Profit & Loss by Job to see
how each deal is going, as well as the profitability of working
with the writer in total.

Invoices

If the amounts will be due at specific times, each invoice can 
be created for each “job” or deal with the Publisher or Movie
Company as the “Bill To” address and the “Ship To” address can be
used for the author, literary work, contract number, or whatever
additional information will need to appear on each invoice. Each
invoice should have the appropriate due date.

Class Feature

Without some additional information regarding the class feature,
I am not sure what would be the best for the client. I would
however, recommend having the discussion. Is there an additional
way that tracking profitability would be useful for the client?
Maybe using the class feature for the type of deal (i.e. are book
deals more profitable than movie deals), first time versus
veteran authors, etc.

Unpaid Bills by Job

As the invoices are entered, the corresponding bills for the
royalty payments can be entered. The “Unpaid Bills by Job” report
is only available in the Contractor and Accountant Editions of
QuickBooks Premier. It is not available and cannot be easily
created in the other QuickBooks products. The advantage of the
report for this client is it will be easier to see who needs to
be paid royalties as payments are received on each deal. 

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Bonnie J. Nagayama, CPA has been featured by Intuit in their 
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