QuickBooks Online job costing for contractors

Job costing means tracking income and costs by job, so you can see a P&L for each job instead of only one for the whole company. Here is the basic structure for doing it in QuickBooks Online.

1. Set up one project per job

In QuickBooks Online Plus and Advanced, the Projects feature groups a customer's invoices, expenses, and time under one job. Create a project for each job you want to track.

2. Tag every cost to a job

Assign each bill, expense, and check line to the customer or project it belongs to. Separate labor, materials, and subcontractor costs so you can see labor vs. materials by job.

3. Run job-level reports

Use project profitability and the Profit and Loss by Customer report to see margin by job each month.

Common mistakes

• —Running every job through the same expense bucket.
• —Coding costs at the company level and never assigning them to a job.
• —Reconciling the bank and calling the books done.

When to hand it off

If you want job-level P&Ls every month without doing the coding yourself, that is the Job Cost plan. See also solar contractor bookkeeping and specialty-trade contractor bookkeeping.

Send revenue, software, and number of active jobs.

We'll tell you the tier in 24 hours.