QuickBooks Online Projects: set up so job profit is right.
Get help with Projects when you turn it on with jobs already in progress, when job costs arrive as bills, card charges and timesheets entered by different people, or when a project shows a profit the job never made. Set up wrong, Projects reports a confident wrong number: it only counts what is assigned to it, so an unassigned bill makes a job look better than it is, and income posted to the customer but not the project makes it look worse. Projects is the job-costing feature in QuickBooks Online, available in Plus and Advanced (and Intuit Enterprise Suite). Below: what Intuit’s own documentation says today, how to use project tracking well, and what each project must show before you trust it.
QuickBooks Online Projects tracks income, costs, labor, and profitability by project or job in one place.
Intuit’s own article sets the plan rule: “If you have QuickBooks Online Plus, QuickBooks Online Advanced, or Intuit Enterprise Suite, you can use projects.” Once you turn the feature on (Account and settings, then Advanced, then “Organize all job-related activity in one place”), you create a project tied to a customer and then assign the transactions that belong to it — invoices, expenses and bills, estimates, and billable time. The Project view then rolls those up into income, costs, and a running profit margin for that job, so you can see which projects make money and which quietly lose it. It’s built for job-costing-style work — construction, agencies, professional and field services — where profitability lives at the job level, not just the company level. The whole feature depends on clean assignment: a project is only as accurate as the transactions tagged to it.
What Intuit’s help articles say about Projects today.
These points come from Intuit’s own US help article for QuickBooks Online projects, quoted where the wording matters. Intuit changes its screens and plan features; where your file differs from this page, Intuit’s current article governs.
- Plans. “If you have QuickBooks Online Plus, QuickBooks Online Advanced, or Intuit Enterprise Suite, you can use projects.”
- Turning it on. Account and settings, then Advanced, then turn on “Organize all job-related activity in one place.” (In Intuit Accountant Suite the setting is “Use project financial tracking”, and Intuit says it “cannot be turned off” once enabled there.)
- Creating a project. All apps, then Projects, then Projects, then New project: “In the Project name field, enter the project name,” “Select a customer from the Customer dropdown,” and enter a start and end date.
- Assigning work. “As you record new transactions, like estimates and invoices, select the Project from the Customer field.” Existing expenses and existing timesheets can be added to a project, and transactions added from the project’s Add to project dropdown.
- What it shows. Projects let you “run project-specific reports to monitor your bottom line,” and a completed project shows “your total income, expenses and profit margin.”
- Plan-limited extras. “If you use QuickBooks Online Advanced, you can also set up project estimates.” Project costing and phases apply to “Intuit Enterprise Suite or QuickBooks Online Advanced with the construction add-on,” and in costing, “If you pick Detailed, you can’t switch back to Basic.”
Sources: Intuit, “Create projects in QuickBooks Online or Intuit Enterprise Suite”. Read on 16 October 2026.
What QuickBooks Online Projects do.
The moving parts of the feature, in the order you meet them — from turning it on through the profitability view that makes it worth doing.
Part 01 · Available in Plus and Advanced
Projects is included in QuickBooks Online Plus and Advanced — the lower plans don’t have it. Intuit Enterprise Suite has it too. If job-level profitability matters to the business, the plan has to support the feature first; you turn Projects on under Account and settings, then Advanced, with the switch Intuit labels “Organize all job-related activity in one place.” This is the one prerequisite everything else depends on.
Part 02 · A project gathers one job in one place
You create a project tied to a customer — one job, engagement, or contract. From then on it’s a container that gathers everything financial about that job: the money in, the money out, and the time spent. Instead of seeing only company-wide totals, you get a view scoped to a single piece of work, which is what makes the difference between jobs visible.
Part 03 · You assign income, costs, and time to the project
The feature works by assignment. As you create invoices, enter expenses and bills, build estimates, and log billable time, you tag each one to the project it belongs to. Those tagged transactions are what populate the project — Projects doesn’t infer anything, so a transaction that isn’t assigned simply doesn’t count toward that job.
Part 04 · Estimates and progress invoicing fit into a project
You can attach an estimate to a project and bill against it with progress invoicing — invoicing a portion of the estimate as the work is delivered. Inside the project, the estimate gives you the planned figure to compare actual income and costs against, which is how you catch a job drifting over budget while there’s still time to act on it. Intuit lists project estimates as an Advanced feature, and project costing and phases as Advanced with the construction add-on or Intuit Enterprise Suite.
Part 05 · The Project dashboard shows profitability
Each project has its own view that rolls the assigned transactions into income, costs, and a running profitability figure with a margin. That single number is the point of the feature: it tells you which jobs make money and which quietly lose it, without you reverse-engineering it from the company-wide P&L. The accuracy of that number is exactly as good as the assignment behind it.
The limit · What Projects does not do: invent data
Projects only reports on what you assign to it — it doesn’t guess. An expense left unassigned, income posted to the customer but not the project, or time logged without being tagged simply won’t appear in the job’s profitability. The feature is powerful, but it’s a mirror of your assignment discipline, not a substitute for it. Get the assignment right and the numbers are right.
How to use project tracking well.
Six steps, in order. The first turns the feature on; the rest are the habits that make project profitability accurate instead of misleading.
- 1
Turn Projects on (on Plus or Advanced)
Confirm you’re on a QuickBooks Online plan that includes Projects — Plus or Advanced — then go to Account and settings, then Advanced, and turn on “Organize all job-related activity in one place.” Until it’s switched on you won’t see the Projects area at all. If you’re on a lower plan and need job costing, the plan upgrade is an Intuit billing matter handled on Intuit’s side.
- 2
Set up items and cost categories first
Job costing is only as useful as the structure underneath it. Before creating projects, set up the products and services items and the expense categories the way you want to see costs broken out, so income and costs land in meaningful buckets. Getting this right up front is far easier than re-categorizing a project’s history later.
- 3
Create a project for each job
From All apps, then Projects, select New project, enter the project name, choose the customer and set the start and end dates for each job, engagement, or contract you want to track. Name projects consistently so they’re easy to find and report on, and keep the scope of a project tight — one job per project — so its profitability means something rather than blending several pieces of work together.
- 4
Assign every related transaction to the project
This is the habit the whole feature rests on. As you invoice the customer, enter expenses and bills, build estimates, and log billable time, select the project in the Customer field (or add existing expenses and timesheets from the project) — every time, not just the obvious ones. The most common reason a project shows the wrong profit is simply transactions that were never assigned to it.
- 5
Use estimates and progress invoicing
Attach an estimate to the project to set the planned numbers, then bill against it with progress invoicing as work is delivered. This gives you planned-versus-actual inside the project, so you can compare what the job was supposed to cost and earn against what it’s actually doing — and catch overruns while you can still respond to them.
- 6
Review project profitability regularly
Open the Project dashboard on a regular cadence and read the income, costs, and margin for each active job. That’s where the feature pays off: spotting a job that’s slipping into the red, confirming a profitable one, and learning which kinds of work to take more of. Reviewing it only at the end of a job is reviewing it too late to act.
What a project must show before you trust its profit: a worked example.
One remodeling job tracked as a project on QuickBooks Online Plus, checked at month-end. This is an illustration, not a client file: the figures are made up to show the checks.
| Check | What the books must show |
|---|---|
| Income assigned | Two progress invoices, $9,000.00 and $6,000.00, were created with the project selected in the Customer field, so the project shows $15,000.00 of income. |
| Costs assigned | Materials bills of $4,800.00 and a subcontractor bill of $3,500.00 are on the project, $8,300.00 in all. |
| Nothing left out | A search of the month’s card charges finds a $650.00 lumber purchase posted from the bank feed without the project; once it is added, project costs are $8,950.00 and profit is $6,050.00, not $6,700.00. |
| Time on the job | Every timesheet for the job is added to the project, so labor appears in its costs rather than only in company-wide wages. |
| The company still ties | Income on all projects plus income from customers without a project equals total income on the company Profit and Loss for the month. |
| Margin read in time | The project’s margin, about 40% after the lumber charge, is read while the job is open, against its estimate, not only when it is marked complete. |
A project that passes these rows tells you what the job really earned. One that fails them tells you what was remembered to be assigned.
When a ProAdvisor should help.
Job-costing setup done right the first time
Mapping items, cost categories, and the chart of accounts so project profitability is meaningful takes judgment — structured enough to be useful, simple enough to maintain. Getting that foundation right when you turn Projects on is far cheaper than restructuring a year of project history later, and it’s exactly the setup a ProAdvisor does cleanly.
Estimates, progress invoicing, and clean assignment
Wiring up estimates and progress invoicing, and building the discipline that gets every invoice, expense, bill, and billable hour assigned to the right project, is where job costing either works or quietly produces numbers nobody trusts. A ProAdvisor sets the workflow up so assignment is routine rather than an afterthought, which is most of what makes Projects accurate.
When projects have been run half-assigned
If Projects has been switched on but transactions have only been assigned some of the time, the profitability figures are already unreliable — and reconstructing job costs across a stretch of history without double-counting is real cleanup work. That’s a file review and a fixed-fee scope, after which the projects report numbers you can actually use.
A QuickBooks ProAdvisor configures project tracking inside your own books.
Turning Projects on takes a click; making project profitability tell the truth is the real work. A QuickBooks ProAdvisor confirms you’re on a plan that includes the feature, sets up the items and cost categories that job-costing depends on, wires up estimates and progress invoicing, and establishes the discipline that gets every invoice, expense, bill, and billable hour assigned to the right project. Where projects have been run with transactions half-assigned, we reconstruct the job costs so the profitability figures are real — against a written scope, inside your own QuickBooks Online file.
Job costing is set up as part of TechBrot’s job costing work, linked below; the monthly books that feed each project are prepared by a senior bookkeeper who works in your software, or by a signed specialist practice when your books need one, with every close reviewed by a Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor before it reaches you.
What TechBrot does not do with your projects.
- We do not change your plan or sell add-ons. Projects needs Plus, Advanced or Intuit Enterprise Suite, and project costing and phases need Advanced with Intuit’s construction add-on or Intuit Enterprise Suite; those are bought from Intuit.
- We do not choose your tax method for long jobs. How revenue on long contracts is reported for tax is your CPA’s call; we keep the job records it rests on. TechBrot does not prepare or file tax returns; we work with your CPA or EA.
- We are not Intuit support. A Projects screen that won’t load, a setting that won’t switch, a login, billing or subscription problem: Intuit handles those.
What people ask about QuickBooks Online Projects.
What do QuickBooks Online Projects actually do?
Projects tracks income, costs, labor, and profitability by project or job in one place. You create a project tied to a customer, then assign the invoices, expenses, estimates, and billable time that belong to it. QuickBooks rolls those up into the project’s income, costs, and a running profit margin, so you can see which jobs make money and which lose it — rather than guessing from the company-wide profit and loss.
Which QuickBooks Online plans have Projects?
Projects is included in QuickBooks Online Plus and Advanced; Intuit’s article, read on 16 October 2026, says “If you have QuickBooks Online Plus, QuickBooks Online Advanced, or Intuit Enterprise Suite, you can use projects.” Project estimates are an Advanced feature. The lower plans don’t include Projects, so a business that needs job-level profitability has to be on Plus or Advanced. Upgrading the plan is an Intuit account and billing matter handled on Intuit’s side; turning the feature on and setting up job costing inside the file is the work a QuickBooks ProAdvisor does.
What can I assign to a project?
Invoices, expenses and bills, estimates, and billable time. When you create or edit those transactions you tag them to the project, and they roll into its profitability. The feature only reports on what you assign — it doesn’t infer anything — so an unassigned expense, or income posted to the customer but not the project, simply won’t show up in that job’s numbers. Clean assignment is what makes the profitability accurate.
Is Projects the same as job costing?
Projects is how QuickBooks Online does job costing. Job costing means tracking the income and costs tied to a specific job to see its profit; Projects is the feature that holds those transactions together and reports the result. It works well for construction, agencies, and professional or field services — any business where profitability needs to be measured job by job, not just across the whole company.
Can Projects track labor and time on a job?
Yes — billable time logged against a project counts toward its costs and profitability, which is part of what makes it useful for service and field work where labor is a major cost. As with everything in Projects, the time has to be assigned to the project to count. Set the workflow up so time is tagged as it’s entered, and the labor side of profitability stays accurate.
Can you set up Projects in my QuickBooks Online file?
Yes — that’s operational work we do inside your own books: confirming you’re on a plan that includes the feature, turning Projects on, setting up the items and cost categories job-costing depends on, wiring up estimates and progress invoicing, and getting every related transaction assigned. We start with a free file review, then a focused setup is one fixed fee, scoped in writing, or a bookkeeping cleanup ($1,200–$15,000+) if the books behind it are behind. An Intuit account or plan issue stays with Intuit.
Why does my project show the wrong profit?
Almost always because transactions weren’t all assigned to it. Projects only reports on what you tag to the project, so an expense left unassigned, an invoice posted to the customer but not the project, or untagged billable time will all leave the profitability figure wrong. The fix is to find the related transactions and assign them — and if a stretch of history is affected, that reconstruction is the kind of cleanup a ProAdvisor handles.