 QuickBooks Online 2023. Projects. Get ready to earn the skills needed to boost your bankbooks on up with QuickBooks Online 2023. Here we are in our QuickBooks Online test company file using the accountant view as opposed to the business view you can toggle between the two views by going to the cog up top and switching the view down below. Duplicating some tabs to put reports in like we do every time right click in the tab up top to duplicate it right click in the duplicated tab to duplicate it back to the tab to the middle as the one to the right is thinking reports on the left hand side we want the balance sheet as that's thinking will tab to the right reports on the left this time we want the P&L the profit and the loss let's close the hand boogie change the range we want April this time because in our practice problem or at least mine it'll be a clean report or fairly clean 040123 to 04323 and let's run that so there's something in it but it's kind of clean we're going to go to the tab to the middle close up the hand boogie and then scroll up top and go from 040123 to 04323 and run that one let's go to the tab to the left this time we're focused in on the projects we've been looking at some of these kind of these added tools in an order that's chronological order when they were kind of support accounting instruction by clicking the link below giving you a free month membership to all of the content on our website broken out by category further broken out by course each course then organized in a logical reasonable fashion making it much more easy to find what you need then can be done on a u2 page we also include added resources such as excel practice problems pdf files and more like quickbooks backup files when applicable so once again click the link below for a free month membership to our website and all the content on it put in place within to the quickbooks system so for example we've looked at in more detail in a prior presentation the jobs which quickbooks online then called sub customers then we went to the class tracking now we're going to the projects next time we'll go to location tracking and then we will go to the tags however if we think about these these tools in terms of which are most similar to each other the projects are most similar to the jobs which quickbooks online calls the sub customers and the classes and the location tracking are most similar and the tags are more similar to the class and location tracking then to the projects and the jobs all right so we're on the projects so when we think about the projects we note that they're similar to the sub customers because they have to be tied to a customer that's the general concept so when when a lot of people kind of think projects a lot of things that might come into mind don't perfectly fit into the range of projects so for example if you're going to have like an event like a dinner that's going to generate revenue and there's going to be expenses related to the dinner or something like that you might say that sounds like a project I want to be able to track the revenue and expenses to that event but that doesn't exactly tie into the concept of projects because the project has to be tied to a customer so in that kind of scenario you might better be able to use the class tracking or the location tracking or the tags so that you can have an income statement by that particular event that happened because if you were trying to set up a project for that event what would happen is if you go to the to the new project here you'd have to assign it to a customer and obviously the event might have multiple customers that are paying customers within the event so you can kind of finagle it to work in that scenario but the the actual project's tool looks to be something that's a more robust type of thing for job costing type of systems than what was previously used which were the jobs and the sub customers so that's generally where the projects shine to kind of take on in a more more robust way the stuff that was happening with the sub customers and the jobs so in order to think about projects we first really have to go to the to the customers so if I go to the customers tab here's our customers closing up the hamburger last time we talked about setting up customers and the sub customers as you can see in the customer field now we're going to set up customers and instead of using the sub customers we will use the projects and the projects will allow us to tie income and expenses to the projects which are tied to the customer in a similar way as these sub customers they will allow us to run reports in a similar way as with the sub customers in other words when I break this out I'm going to be breaking it out by customers which will show which will show the customers and it would show the sub customers and it would show the projects if we had those in this particular time range as we will see going forward notice that's different than the tags the classes and the the location tracking because those give you this whole other field in here to search by classes so if I run by class everything that got tagged with a class will now be populated in that format so it's a it's a different kind of concept because the projects are tied to a customer okay so let's go to the tab to the left let's add some some new customers just customer four and five and put our projects just to those customers so I'm going to say we have a new customer and I'm just going to say customer customer number four and we will add that and then we'll say new customer hold on a sec back to my customers and then a new customer customer five save it now also I'll recall we touched on in a prior presentation that the sub customers don't necessarily go away if you're using projects because one you're only going to have access to projects if you're using pro or above if you're using something under that in terms of pay price tiers then you might still be able to utilize the sub customers in a similar way as we saw in the past and sometimes you might want to collect connect a sub customer to a a project to a sub customer I should say so you might want to have a sub customer and then connect the project to the sub customer possibly for billing reasons so they can kind of work together in some cases as well all right so there so now we've got our customers set up let's go and set up a project so I'm going to go open this up go to the projects this is where it gets a little bit confusing because because it has its own field over here you might think that the projects aren't connected to the customers because you would think if they were they would be in the customers area however the projects needs its own kind of location over here so we can have all the cool things that are related to the projects in and of itself so we've got the status tracking we had one project we set up before we've got the project that is open in progress completed canceled this kind of terminology here is standard for like a job cost kind of system so that's the kind of thing that the projects kind of fits into best although you might think of other uses for the projects and then you've got your customers all customers or you can pick a particular customer and the drop down employee rates and so then we've got our customers down below then up top I can say new project let's do that I'm going to have a new project let's say it's going to be I'm just going to generically name it project project number four and that's going to be related to customer number four note that I have to have a customer that's why there's a little asterisk here you can't set up a project without a customer because you're going to be running reports by customer in order to look at the projects generally I'm going to pick a date a starting date just at the beginning of the year so it's make sure I have that it's going to be in progress as the default or sometimes when you start the project it might be not started at that point and then you go into the in progress and then when it's completed completed if the project isn't going forward to cancel the project all right so we're going to say save it then it actually just goes into the project so you can see up top that it actually went into the next field if I want to go back to the to the intro field there's our project we had project one now we have project number four so if we go into project number four now we can add most of the stuff that's related to the project from this field so in other words normally when we open invoices we go to this plus button and expenses over here now we've got another place that we can open those within the project which is actually kind of nice because it can help us to make sure that we're assigning the invoices and the expenses for example to the appropriate project as opposed to mistakenly doing it to the customer for example which could be an easy kind of mistake to make because the project's connected to the customer so you've got your little income summary up up top the profit margin up top open invoices overdue invoices and then you've got your tabs here this is your little income statement a nice quick overview of this particular project income minus costs there's your profit invoices expenses bills payroll hour information overview tab transactions tab so this is going to be the transactions related to this particular project kind of housed within here in a similar fashion as transactions related to customers are housed in the customer area time activity if we have any time activity applied and then we've got the project reports and so these are the internal reports for the particular project that are tied to this particular project you can also go to reports and find like the overview summary report which gives you kind of an overview of all the projects and you can run the balance sheet on the income statement by customer that will break out the projects that are kind of related to the customers in a similar fashion as we saw with the sub customers which used to be called jobs and then you can have your attachments and stuff over here to add your attachments so the idea here being is that when we have these longer term jobs we can kind of house everything into this window in a much more comprehensive type of way than with the sub customers all right so let's go back to the first tab and let's add you know some common concepts here some common forms oftentimes the project will start off with an estimate so we might have an estimate that we're sending out for project number four which is populated automatically now because i opened it from this project field i'm going to do it as of 040123 and let's say the estimate is let's say hours hours we'll just say 400 i'm not going to add a class and then we'll say that there's going to be labor let's say of 600 and then we're going to say that there's going to be materials of 10 000 and oftentimes note that that when you're putting your your estimate in here i'm putting it into products and services so these aren't going to the actual account we're setting up these items that are the things they're going to be driving the income and expense accounts that will be impacted when i make an estimate it's just an estimate it's not going to have any kind of effect on the financial statements but it's often the thing that you're going to start off with when you're trying to gauge with a client a long-term job and whether they're going to be moving forward with the job so if i save it and close it so then we have this nothing happened on the first pages here because there's no income or expenses if i go to the transaction activity we can see our estimate within the transaction activity so then the next thing that might happen is we might you know start to get some expenses before i go into it just note obviously most of the stuff on these forms are income or performance related items so they're not really breaking out the balance sheet items within here we're kind of focused in on the profit and loss the income statement items okay so let's say we're going to go up top and add an expense form now note that i've made the expense forms billable and i i put a markup of 30 let's show you that real quick if i go to the tag the cog and account and settings and then we go to the expenses on the left hand side i've i've got this marked off so i can make the the expense items billable meaning when i enter an expense i'm going to pull it into the invoice and then i'm going to mark up each line item by that 30 percent so i'm going to go ahead and say okay let's do it then add an expense and i'm going to make the expense just to a generic vendor vendor number two generic vendor i'm going to delete what i had in there before it's going to be four one okay and then note that when i add the expenses i could add them by account down here or i can add them by item it's a little bit easier to add them by account but we have a little bit less control when we use that billable function to pull them into the invoice so i'm going to imagine we're starting a project and i have expenses related to it let's first just categorize those expenses cost to goods sold labor and i'm going to say is a hundred dollars and then we'll say cost of goods sold i think i have materials or materials or something supplies and materials okay let's do fifty dollars and so there we have it these are going directly to the account and we're going to use the project field to to assign it to project number four so what's this going to do reduce the checking account by the full amount of the 150 the other side is going to go into these two expense accounts and then i should be able to break out at least the income statement by project using the sort by customer field so let's go and save it and close it and check it out save it and close it so now we've got the 150 showing up in our little income statement summary it's going to show up in our transactions area over here so there we have that and then we've got and notice here it has the expense form and it also has the billable expenses these are the things that are pulling are going to pull into the invoice when we bill the client for the expenses that we had incurred if i go to the tab to the right then i can look at my balance sheet and so there's our balance sheet there's the 150 notice it's not breaking it out because the balance sheet side doesn't always break out perfectly by these when we when we use these items it's going to be breaking out by the line items we assigned it to which are generally the income statement side if i go to the income statement and run the report let's run it by class not by class by customer by customer there we have it so now we've got our our 150 and the 50 for the full 150 of costs that are assigned to project number four project number four looking similar to the sub customers in that it's tied to customer number four so you got customer number four then the project that's related to it and then the total for customer number four so like with the sub customers this ends up in a very long report if you have customers that aren't related to projects then you can have a quite long report but you could of course filter by project as well using your filtering option up top and you can filter here by the by the customer and then you can pick you know the project i think this was the project that's not the project we were doing we're doing this project you can filter that way and then you can filter down i'm going to turn that filter off and bring it back out or you can run reports within here by the projects we can say let's go back to the project for and then we can go to our project reports and then we now we have our profitability report the most common report and there's our nice profitability report by project this is great but you it's also quite nice a lot of people just focus on this report but you also want to see all of the projects together oftentimes so you can see how the projects kind of fit into the totals on your financial statements which means you're going to have to run something like this profit and loss which is a little bit more tedious because of all the customers that are going to be breaking out into it although you can filter it then if if you were breaking something out by like class which is just the columns that are assigned classes and therefore is usually a little bit cleaner because it has less columns you know cluttering up everything oftentimes with the classes okay so let's go back up and go back to the customers now if i go to the first tab then uh let's go back to our project detail and we could pull that into an invoice now we could say okay now we're going to invoice kind of as we're going here to the customer for the stuff that we bought for the project so we can say okay i'm going to pull that into an invoice and notice i could pull the stuff in from the estimate now or i could pull the stuff in from the billable items i'm going to pull it in from the billable items because i put a markup of that 30 markup here and so now this is going to be going to customer number four and that stuff pulled in to the invoice and there's the 195 now it pulled it into the invoice and marked it up with a separate line item of the 30 so what's this going to do invoice increases $195 accounts receivable the other side's going to be going to uh to the line item that the that the system's going to pick which are going to be the billable kind of income line item because i did not use items to assign exactly the income statement i want the income statement account so let's save it and close it and just to check it out we could see there it is 195 minus the 150 45 profit if i go to my balance sheet and run it by customer now the the the accounts receivable isn't breaking out here by customer but on the income statement it should so if i run it on the income statement then i've got my income up top for project number four which is tied to customer number four minus the cost of goods sold and i can see that in conjunction with all the other projects for the month of april which i don't have any not much else going on but i want to be able to tie it out to the to the total income on the right hand side is the point all right let's do another one over here let's say let's go back on over and let's let's go back and make another project project number five just so we can see a couple of them together new project project number five and we're going to make this connected to customer number five start date i'm just going to say the the beginning of the year and it's in progress so we'll save it and then it takes me into project number five so if i go back to my projects now i can see all the open projects here i can go into project number five we could do a similar thing but this time i'll use items when i assign the costs so i'm going to say we could make an estimate for project number five and there's the estimate and then i can say okay we have labor of let's say uh let's say five thousand this time and then materials materials of four thousand and there's our total estimate boom we'll say save it and close it nothing actual happens to the financial statements but i see that in my transaction detail report then i'm going to put in some costs so let's put in some expenses generically going to vendor number two and let's say this happens on four five i'm going to close these out this time i'm not going to use the category field but this time the item field the items allow me to have a little bit more flexibility when i pull the billable items into the invoice so i can say okay labor on the item let's say was one thousand so far i'm going to make it billable and then go into project number five and then over here i'm going to say we want materials and let's say it's for uh 700 billable and it's pulling in the project number five now sometimes like this field kind of disappears but it's still there i think it's like if i if i'm too zoomed in or something sometimes it kind of disappears when i go off of it but it's still there i believe and we could double check it that can get a little kind of irritating that kind of there's like a phantom field there but it's still there so if i record this what's going to do it's going to decrease the checking account by the 1700 the other side's going to go to the expense forms which are driven by the items now which are pointing to the cost of goods sold forms and i'll be able to pull it over to the invoice so let's save it and close it and so now we can see our costs and our profit and loss little summary here tab to the right run it doesn't really break it out on the balance sheet but if i go to the income statement and run it now we've got customer number five and the project related to customer number five now notice the last time when i pulled it into the income account it made it up its own account of billable expenses this time it's going to go to the account i assigned which is product income because i used items to to pull it over so i'm going to go back on over let's make our invoice and for so now i'm going to pull in those billable items similar to what we did last time but this time we used items in conjunction with it so it looks much the same but now i'm now these items are going to tell when i set up the items which i did in the prior presentation i told it to point to a an income account and so QuickBooks won't just make up an income account it'll use the income account we want it still makes up an income account for the markup however this is going to increase accounts receivable by two two one zero other side going to the income account that we assigned it to go to save it and close it to it with the items we assigned it with the items there's our income minus the cost there's our gross profit let's just go to the pnl and uh run it so now we've got our our project here and notice it didn't just make up a billable expense account but it went into the sales of product income so we have more control when we use the items although it's a little bit a little bit more of an added step but it's probably the the way to go so there's there's the general concept with the items uh i mean the projects if i was to increase this and go out to o five thirty one two three then we can see the similarities with the customers because i had my customers and sub customers out here i think actually i had to go all the way out to 2025 is where we used our sub customer but you can see the similarities we've got the customers the sub customers and then the total customer sub customer and then the total similarities with the projects the projects are different but you have a similar structure in that you've got the customer the project and then the total now again it's possible to have a customer and then a sub customer and connect the project to the sub customer uh in in that kind of uh layered type of fashion but these reports are fundamentally a little different than the class tracking reports where you would have you're just breaking things out by class as you assign the classes they're not assigned to the customer now you could if i right click on this again and duplicate the reports and i go down to the reports on the left hand side and i look up just project reports project reports you've got this project profitability summary and that gives you like kind of like an income statement but it's it's quite condensed of the profitability for for uh each each of the projects of the customer income uh expenses so the project here and then the customer income and expenses and then you can filter these reports by what is in progress and so on so i can go to my filters and i can filter by project status here which is a common filter whether it be in progress or complete or so on now note that you might start thinking well look this this is going to be ridiculous after i have like a hundred customers because if i run a report like this one it's going to be massively wide it's going to go on for a mile but that's not generally the case because it's only going to show the activity on the income statement reports for the customers that have activity for the time range that you are working on so it's not likely that you're going to be working on you know well it depends on you know millions of projects in a year right so if you're running a years long project report it's going to run the projects that you had that were running for that year and then again you can you may be able to further filter down the projects by the project status okay so the other kind of big thing that the projects have over like the sub customers and even the use of the classes and stuff in some ways is the integration with the payroll so we turn if you can if you don't have payroll on in your 30 day practice trial you might be able to turn it like a 30 day payroll practice on to play with the payroll items because that has some differences within it too so we saw before that if i have payroll on i can go to my cog up top and i can go to my payroll settings over here and if i go down to my payroll settings in the accounting i have the ability to assign like a class to it so the class tracking has the ability to assign an employee to a particular class but i don't have that same thing with the projects and even if i did it wouldn't really work because i don't really assign one particular employee to a project what i want to be able to do is assign their particular hours the time they spent to a particular project and of course payroll gets complex because you know not only have the payroll cost but also the payroll taxes and stuff that ideally you would like to be able to tie out to the projects so you can't do that although and but even if you could it wouldn't be the ideal thing for projects usually as the projects are generally used so but if you have hourly employees then you you may be able to assign the hours to the project but you have to use the time sheets to do that so if you're if you're running payroll within quickbooks for hourly employees that you're tracking the time then you can use the the weekly time sheets to assign out the time and that's one way that they can assign it to the projects which is pretty which is pretty neat uh that's a cool thing but if they're salaried employees you can't do that so much and uh and so there might be another workaround you could try to do like a journal entry kind of format in a similar fashion that we we saw with the class tracking so maybe we'll take a look at that but let's just check it out i'm just gonna i've got my one employee set up i just set up a generic employee and so let's set up a weekly time sheet and see how we can pull this into the project so i'm going to say that this is going to be there's my one employee up top let's say she's working sometime in the month early in the month here that i'm working on uh april and we're going to say that this is going to be for project here there's the project and then we got the select payment item select uh regular pay and then i'm going to assign it to my my labor is the item uh class i'm not going to assign a class it's going to be labor now notice it gets a little bit confusing because down here you're going to say well it's billable what does that mean that means that you're going to you're going to make it as a billable item in a similar fashion as we did to the expense pulling it in to an income statement with this item here but also what we want to do is when we pay the employee we want to assign their expenses to to the job to the project the project job so they're two different things so the billable item is usually going to be the marked up item that you're going to add to the invoice so we might have a different billable rate of course then the actual expenses that are going to be generated when we process the payroll for our employee which will be assigned to the job all right so let's do it let's say there's 10 hours here let's let's do it let's do i think 30 hours let's do 30 hours here assigned to that particular project all right let's save it and close it now i'm going to go back up to the projects it shouldn't have assigned any of the payroll yet but it should have like that billable item i think i put it into project four i believe and so if i go into my transactions then i should have a billable item for the time here we here we see it and if i if i go to my time tracking there's the time tracking information from my employee and if i was to add an invoice we won't actually add it but if i was to do an invoice we can see that billable item is popping up for me to pull it in based on not the actual payroll that was processed but the billable item now if i process payroll going into the payroll here and then actually process it i'm going to run payroll run it running and let's say that we're going to do it for some time in April let's say the beginning here let's do there and then let's say it was for uh 30 all right i got the right period here chance it was april second that i put the time in so there it is and let's let's make the payment date sometime uh in april as well so we'll say april 15th all right so the 30 hours is then pulling in here it's going to calculate the pay let's say uh preview and i'm just going to run it submit and boom okay quick books maybe adjust the pay date out here so i'm going to pull it as of may but in any case if i go back on over to our report and i'm going to bring it up uh to may third and run it then we've got our payroll item for customer number four that was broken out so you can see it broke out both the taxes and the payroll for that time frame which is quite nice that's a good deal so so that works well again but only for like hourly employees if you're processing payroll within the quick book system if if not then you could try to just process payroll you know as as easily as possible make payroll easy and then basically do a journal entry that would assign the payroll per class so for example if you had you know payroll expense over here at like a thousand dollars that was unassigned to a specific job it was just over here in payroll expenses then maybe you could do a journal entry that's going to basically assign it to a project so let's go to the first tab and i'm just going to go to the plus button and let's make a journal entry and i'll make it as a four five that's good and i'm going to make up another account just going to be called wages for by job by job or project wages by project and i'm going to say it's going to be an expense type of account and i'll just say it's going to be another other business expense wages by project saving it and then i'm just going to say if there was a thousand dollars that i need to reallocate i would put say a thousand dollar credit decreasing it the name is going to be unnamed first because it wasn't allocated to a job and then i'm going to put it into wages by job wages by project of a thousand and assign it to project number what did i say four is what we were working on so notice it's the it's the it's the same account here i'm not going to put it to the actual wages account itself because i don't want to mess with that i want that to tie out to the payroll and be able to look at the detail and not have any other stuff with it but i'll use another account a clearing account to reassign between the columns if i can to the proper customer so let's let's try that and save it and then if i go to my reports i can see here that i've got my my project four where i have this wages by project down here and then i've got the decrease to the non-specified item something that's not specified to a job so in other words if i had my payroll that was going to wages over here for a thousand dollars and i wanted to reallocate it to job number four i can do it with a journal entry but i'm not going to reduce wages itself i'm going to net out the wages account with this other account so that i don't so they don't have any detail in this wages account that's going to confuse my payroll just for payroll reporting purposes i can tie out to this number but i should have an equal and opposite number over here which would then allocate it to the proper projects that we want to do and that's not too tedious of a task you know to do to do now notice that projects also kind of advertise their little payroll calculator over here so if you go into projects and they'll say well if you don't process payroll you can use this payroll employee rate calculator up top and so you can't do that i can i can set up my employee use the calculator and it calculates the proper payroll taxes and everything that i would apply to the job but the problem is like if i apply this calculation to the project it's only a it's an internal calculation to the project i mean it only affects this field it's not really an actual journal entry it's not going to be reflected on the income statement because if it were you would have basically run payroll twice so it's kind of that might be useful for internal reporting for the project itself but ideally you'd like your most of time you'd like your full income statement over here to be reflecting actual payroll that would be broken out by the actual projects so i don't find that tool i find that tool to be possibly helpful in some cases but i think it's a little bit misleading in the indication that on how it might work best because i think you know it runs into problems because you're not actually posting the transaction to the financial statements so when you're trying to tie out to the financials you know that's what you would typically want to do i would think so i don't so you have that tool but but again i would think the other methods might be a better way to go with the payroll so that's the general idea with the projects