Quantify helps you capture your expenses and revenues so you can get a handle on job costing.  

“Using job costing will allow you to identify the most and least profitable areas of your business, so that you can focus on the profitable elements, and try to make the less profitable aspects of your business more efficient. It will help you to quote new jobs more accurately, and assist you in managing jobs in progress.”

This is an excerpt from a great article on job costing. You can find the entire article here:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/accounting/HA101835601033.aspx

Backing up your data is simple.

Open the Data and Activation Tools. (From your Windows Start button, select All Programs, scroll to the Avontus Quantify folder & click on it to open. Then select Data and Activation Tools.)

Click on the Database Backup/Restore tab and the Backup… button.

If you’d like to change the location that the backup file is saved to, click the Browse button. Otherwise, click OK.

Remember that it’s a good practice to save a copy of your data on another computer.

Here are instructions on how to automate backups in SQL 2008 Express. You can forward to your IT department:

http://www.brianmadden.com/blogs/guestbloggers/archive/2007/05/07/how-to-automate-the-backup-of-a-sql-server-2005-express-data-store.aspx

Continuous improvement of business practices involves looking at your history to see what worked and what can be improved. Knowledge of the movement of your equipment is vital to keeping your business healthy - both financially and operationally. While equipment rental might not be your primary moneymaker, the lack of available equipment can be the biggest cause of losing money. For some companies, renting equipment allows you to provide labor, as well. Since renting equipment from other companies can get out of control it's vital to see the movements of re-rent to effectively manage returns while minimizing freight costs. The areas for improvement are countless and Product History provides the insight needed.

Historic movements of products are calculated, summarized, and saved, allowing you to examine a slice of time. The key idea behind product history is that you can see your asset value, cost, price to your customer, and weight. The data is summarized and/or filtered by whatever value you'd like, such as a job site, owner (what you own and what your vendor owns that you're renting to your customer). At the root of the history is a daily balance. This daily balance shows the total quantities located at a job site or branch office/laydown yard. When parts are delivered to a location the balance increases, and when they're returned the balance decreases. This daily balance is used to calculate the daily rent, cost, and weight.

Figure 1 - Product history for a few parts 

To get started, click the Add button to calculate product history for each month you’ll want to view. Start with the month of your first shipment. Enter any date during the month (entering any date from 6/1/10 or 6/30/10 will generate data for June 2010, for example) and click the Calculate button. This action calculates the daily balances throughout your company for the month that you select and stores them for quick summarization later.

Since the daily balance is based on the prior day’s balance plus any deliveries or returns, you must calculate product history for each month in a range. If you wish to see 1/1/10 – 3/31/10, for example, you can’t calculate just January and March; February must be calculated, also. (And, as mentioned above, you should start with the month of your first shipment so that your beginning balance is accurate.)

After the data is calculated for the months you want to see, enter start and end dates and load the data by clicking Refresh. If you want to summarize the data by, for example, location and owner as shown below, then drag and drop those fields onto the row headers. Notice that after these fields are dropped, the data is grouped by the value (location, then owner). The daily balance is displayed for each of these, as seen in Figure 2.

 

In Figure 2, note that the daily balance increases on 4/2 for several parts as deliveries are made. You see not only the total by location, but also the quantity that is owned by you and by the vendor you're renting from (Alverca Concrete, in this case). If there were multiple re-rent owners, you'd see each one here. Compare this with Figure 1 and you'll see that the totals are the same for each day.

Figure 2 - Product history grouped by location and re-rent owner

Now let's swap out Balance with Rent to see the total rent value for each day.

In Figure 3 below we see the value of the rent (rent rate * daily balance).

Figure 3 - Displaying Rent instead of Daily Balance 

Another powerful feature in the pivot is the ability to filter the data. To do this, hover your mouse over one of the buttons that you want to filter. You'll see a small filter icon appear in the upper right corner of the button.

When you click this button a list of values appear. From this list you can select all values (the default), one value, or several. Let's look at the equipment that is owned by Alverca Concrete by filtering on the owner (remember, what you own is blank under Owner in the list). The location and value of the rent for each day is shown in Figure 4 below.

 
Figure 4 - All Equipment Owned by Alverca

Sorting is accomplished by clicking on the sort arrow. Note that all buttons have an up and down triangle, which indicates the sort order.

The pivot control has a print preview that allows you to save this data to Excel or PDF for further analysis or sharing with employees or customers.

The latest version of Quantify includes a return address on all three of the invoice styles (detailed, summary, and summary with rent lines), which is used to tell your customer where to send payment.

This address comes from the 'Billing' address of the parent branch office (or laydown yard) that the job belongs to.

You can have different addresses for each of the different branch offices within your company if they're each responsible for managing their own receivables. Alternately, if your company uses a single address, simply enter the same billing address for all branch offices.

Notice also that the label above the address says "Send payment to:". This label can be changed to show different text, such as "Remit To". To change this label, click on the Tools menu, then in Global Options click on the Reports tab and change the text for this label.

Quantify includes the option to add sales tax to your invoices.

To include sales tax, go to Global Options under the Tools menu and click on the Accounting tab.

Under Tax options, select “Use tax rate on job” and click OK.  (If you have more than one tax, such as State and County, select both rates and enter the appropriate name for each.)

 
Next, go to the job site’s billing tab and select "Charge tax on rent". Create a new sales tax rate by clicking on the green plus sign or use the drop-down list to select an existing tax rate.

Taxes are automatically calculated on each invoice run, depending upon the settings at each job site as well as whether each unit price or rental item is selected to be taxable.

If you’ve generated invoices but have not set up taxes, you can edit invoices to include them. Select the invoice in the list & click on the edit button (double-click will display the invoice print preview). Select “charge tax on rent” and/or set the unit price checkbox to taxable, then select the appropriate tax rate.