UPDATED 11/08/2021
QuickBooks Online Plus/Advanced is a really great accounting software that is 100% could and deeply connected to banks and credit cards electronically to optimize the data entry workflows
What QuickBooks Online Plus or Advanced CAN do with Job Costing / Project Tracking:
- Create Projects that belong to a Customer or Sub-customer
- Toggle Projects as In-Progress/Completed/Canceled to be able to filter
- Assign expense transactions (such as Bills, Checks, and Expenses – such as for debit/credit card transactions) to a particular Customer, Sub-Customer, and/or Project
- Assign a fully burdened cost rate including: Wages, Employer Taxes, Worker’s Comp, and Overhead to each employee to be able to track the estimated labor costs for a project using Time sheets. NOTE: this feature ONLY works if you do NOT run Payroll Within QuickBooks
- If you run payroll inside QuickBooks, the gross wages and taxes can be assigned to projects as long as the timesheet (with time assigned to projects) is created before running payroll. NOTE: you cannot add additional burdened costs such as Worker’s Comp, Health Insurance, Overhead, etc.. to the project when running payroll through QuickBooks
- Product a Profit and Loss Report by Project
- Add notes to a project
- Assign an estimated hourly cost to a vendor and a billable rate
- Generate a Transactions List report for a specific project
- Generate a time activity report for a specific project
- Generate an Unbilled Time and Expenses report for a specific project
- Generate an estimates time cost by employee or vendor for a specific project
What QuickBooks Online Plus or Advanced CANNOT do with Job Costing / Project Tracking:
- You cannot create an Estimate with estimated item cost (to calculate projected margin in a Project)*
- You cannot track Project’s important dates, such as start date, estimated completion date, actual completion date, etc*
- You cannot track or organize projects by Job Type*
- You cannot create a Project job Status report *
- You cannot generate commonly needed reports such as Estimates vs. Actuals or Job Progress Percent reports *
- You cannot create a WIP Report or a committed costs report **
* All these features are available in QuickBooks Desktop (All versions)
** These features are available in QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise
The following cannot be done by either QuickBooks Desktop or QuickBooks Online, and you might need a 3rd party app like KNOWIFY to achieve
- AIA-style billing
- Setup and simple consequent maintenance/warranty work to a project
- Manage/track job dispatching or scheduling
- Create notifications or special proactive dashboard/reports indicating when a project is out of budget or getting close to it
This video explains how Job Costing / Projects for QuickBooks Online in-depth, recorded in April 2019, but is 100% relevant still, as these features have not changed