Updated 02/22/2021
QuickBooks Online Plus has the following features which tend to be useful for contractors:
- Job Costing of Bills, Checks/Expenses, and Credit card Charges by Job, Class, Location
- Basic Progress Invoicing
- Budgets by Project (which could be used to compare Estimates vs. Actuals)
- Profit and Loss by Customer:Project
- Custom fields in invoice headers (for reps and other custom data tracking for jobs, but not available in summary reports)
- Timesheet data can pass through the Projects section as a “labor” – but does not get posted into P&L*
But, it does NOT have these features that QuickBooks Desktop has:
- *Payroll-Level Job Costing with overhead allocations – Although QB Payroll will allow labor to be posted to the P&L and/or Project (limited capability) – see video
- Worker’s Comp Burden into Payroll and Certified Payroll Reports
- True Progress Invoicing
- Estimates vs. Actual Detail and Job Profitability Detail reports
- Job status, Job Type, Job Start/End Tracking
- Vendor Type (to group vendors in logical categories for reports)
- Estimate Cost and Markup Tracking
- Mileage Tracking
- Tracking Reps and Custom fields in expenses
- WIP and Committed Cost Reports (Enterprise Only)
- Custom Summary Reports
- Sales Orders (to manage Internal work-orders)
- Sales Rep Reports
- Timesheet tracking for vendor bills
- Forecasting and Cashflow projections
- Billing Rate Levels
- Specialty Reports, such as: Open PO by Job Report, Custom Summary Reports
- Group Items (with ability to hide Items)
- Change Order Tracking
- Project Status Report (a list of all active Projects, Status, Percentage completed/Invoiced, etc)
And for that reason, I almost never recommend QuickBooks Online for Contractors and Project-Based Businesses. There are two 3rd party apps that seem promising such as: BuilderTrend And Knowify; but it will require the combination of QBO + the app to be able to get close to what QuickBooks Desktop can do…
Here is an article on QuickBooks Desktop Contractor features that we train our clients on…
