JeSTeRs definition of Jobs and Customers, clarified

If you are a company that has only a single level of Customers/Jobs in Quickbooks then this is a non-issue.  As you start to add Customer/Jobs underneath of Customer/Jobs in Quickbooks this starts to become a problem if you do not understand it properly.  Things that you treat as Jobs in Quickbooks can become Customers in JeSTeR if you are not careful.

The easiest way to explain it is this:
    If it has sub-jobs then it will be a Customer in JeSTeR.  If it does not have any sub-jobs it will be a Job in JeSTeR.

If you understand the concept of a sub-job then that is all you need to read.  The rest just describes sub-jobs and shows you how to change the parent of a sub-job in order to fix an existing problem.

Inside of Quickbooks when you want to create a new Customer you hit the "New Customer & Job" button on the Customer/Job List.  This adds a new Customer that is on the first level.  You can then add sub-jobs to this Customer by right clicking on the Customer and selecting 'Add Job'.  Doing this creates a job that is under that customer.  It is shown visually by being indented under the Customer.  You can add another sub-job, one level lower, by clicking the job you just created and selecting 'Add Job'.  If you do what I just described you would end up with a Customer List looking something like this.



The lines that will show up in JeSTeR as Customers are highlighted in yellow while the green highlights are Jobs.  This can be a desired setup if you have a company as the first level, with a sub-job of say a community, with multiple sub-jobs of houses under those.  In that case the community is a customer and this is how you should setup your customer list.  In this case though we want to do 2 jobs for the Bill and Lona, a new sunroom addition and new windows throughout the house.

What should have happened when adding the Windows job is that you right click on the Customer (Jones, Bill and Lona) and say 'Add Job' .  What did happen is that the Sunroom job was selected and right clicked on so that 'Add Job' was done to Sunroom. 

Fixing this is simple.  Goto the Windows job and click on the down arrow next to Customer and you should see something like this.


This is saying that the Parent of the Windows Job is the Sunroom.  We want to change that selection by selecting the "Jones, Bill and Lona" Customer.  Afterwards selecting the down arrow will show you this.



This now shows that the Windows sub-jobs parent is "Jones, Bill and Lona".  The view still shows the old setup (the Windows is still indented under Sunroom) until you select OK.  Once the Job is saved and it goes back to the Customer/Job List it shows the proper layout.  Your Customer/Job List should now look something liket his..



Now you see the Windows and Sunroom jobs both are on the same level (indention) and both are Jobs.  (Green - Jobs, Yellow - Customer). 

Now when you sync with JeSTeR you will be able to look at two seperate Jobs instead of just one Job and two Customers.  You can then move both the Jobs through your critical path as normal.