How can you even suggest and offer DELETE the invoice? Come on!

If you run a small business and do your own bookkeeping you wont even be spelling a delete the invoice statement!. Invoice is created either sent to customer or it may even be paid already. Deleting will mess up entire accounting system that there is. Please be careful here recommending so called solutions to little guys like us who is seeking advice here, not to add problem to our accounting system.

We can not even think of deleting the invoice, that is not an option. We need a way to add existing Estimate and Invoice to Project. And I think all of us here because we created the Project AFTER we created the Estimate and Invoice. If we did create the PROJECT before we wont be having this issue here. However myself create many estimates and send the clients. Not all estimate becomes real job, therefore real invoice. PROJECT option on QB was the only reason I upgraded my plan and now thinking of finding a alternative software which wont have this issue.

I have a different issue.  I get  revenue via invoices that relates to specific projects.  For example, some have sponsors who provide funding; I have to invoice the donations and keep track of them via the customer/sponsor.  Alas, that means I can't track them directly in the project.  I created a workaround with tags that helps me group them, but I have to add them into the financial calculations manually.  A dropdown for "project" on the invoice creation page would be great.  It might also solve the problems listed above.

Hi kkwire, 

This is a great idea! Thank you for letting us know your workaround. 

I will pass your feedback on to the team. 

Thanks, 

Rebecca 

I pay a lot of money for this software.  This is absolutely ridiculous that I can't add an existing invoice to a project without deleting it.

Hi WFR84, 

Thank you for sharing your feedback and I am sorry you feel that way. 

To add an existing invoice to a project, you can try changing the customer on the invoice to the project listed under the customer in the customer dropdown box. 

Please let us know if that works for you and if you require any additional assistance. Thank you. 

I'm experiencing the same difficulty so adding my comment to the list of others. We have just started using CoConstruct as our project management software. It allows us to link our client and their project to the corresponding client data in quickbooks. We have many repeat customers with pre-existing payment histories. Without the ability to associate a pre-existing invoice with a newly created project; all the previous payment history for that client gets imported. This means for any client we've ever received a payment from, when we start a new project it shows 'X' amount of money already paid and completely messes up our financials. As a result we're not able to link, push or pull payment data from quickbooks for any client we've ever taken a payment from in the past. It's chaos. 

Hi NinjaFlip, 

Thank you for reaching out on this and welcome to our community!

The best time to add existing invoices to projects is before they’re paid. If you add a paid invoice to a project, the invoice will disconnect from the attached payment. This will also change the invoice’s status to unpaid. You’ll need to follow the steps to reconnect the payment to avoid accidentally charging customers twice.

We don’t recommend adding invoices linked to more than one other transaction, billable expense, or timesheet. If you add a linked invoice to a project, only the invoice is added. You’ll need to add the linked transactions to the project and reconnect them to the invoice.

You can add existing estimates to projects as long as you haven’t converted them to invoices.

For more information on projects in QuickBooks Online, please visit the link down below: 

Set up and create projects in QuickBooks Online

Thank you and please let us know if you require any additional assistance.

NO this DOES NOT WORK! I have read this entire thread to hopefully find a solution at the end. I don't know how many times people have suggested changing the name to the "project" under the customer name and, bingo! NO NO NO this does not work. LINKED TRANSACTIONS will be deleted when trying to change a paid invoice. I am no engineer but this seems a little ridiculous that this has not been fixed. It has been a year. I really wish I had known this before upgrading QB for the "projects" feature. I have all my Expenses (job supplies, subcontractors, etc) under the specific project. BUT ALL my projects I have no profits because I CANNOT LINK A PAID INVOICE TO THE PROJECT. This is the issue. This projects tab is worthless to me until this can be fixed. 

So please fix this issue! 

I have tried everything. Making new estimates for the price paid on invoices and transferring to specific project. Does not work, and now I have Estimates for said customer that I cannot even delete. That is frustrating.

I have tried a sales receipt for the amount of the paid invoice. Got excited when I could link it to the project for the said amount. Nope. Throughs off my P&L and essentially doubles what customers have paid. 

I am lost

Hi LINKConstruction, 

Thank you for getting back to us on this and sorry to hear about your experience. 

I just did a few tests in my test file by changing the name of the customer on existing invoices to the project then save and it worked for me. The existing invoices were moved to the new project I created. 

I would suggest contacting our support team so we can assist you over a SmartLook (Screensharing) session. Here is a link to our Contact Us page:

https://help.quickbooks.intuit.com/en_AU/contact

Thank you and please let us know if you require any additional assistance.

So you don't have any linked transaction? On your test did you have those? That is what keeps popping up, " This will remove any linked transactions. Do you want to keep your attachments?". When clicking YES, its back to an open invoice and all payments linked to this invoice are now gone. I have continued once after saving this and I won't do it again because it caused a huge mess in my reports, FOR 1 paid invoice being deleted. 

if you got the popup please just explain what you did after clicking YES to the above popup. How do you get that PAID invoice linked back with transactions and customer while showing up in PROJECTS and not charging the customer again? 

Thanks ZAC

Hi LINKConstruction, 

Thank you for getting back to us on this. To clarify: You are trying to assign a paid invoice for a customer to a project?

I did try to assign a paid invoice to a project by changing the customer's name to the sub-customer as a project and it worked. Both the invoice and invoice payment have been moved to the sub-customer. 

I also did try to assign an invoice that was copied from a quote and marking that invoice as paid then change the customer on the invoice, then that's when the 3 transactions broke. Is this what you are experiencing? 

Adding to the cry for a fix on this. It is a huge issue for QBO customers and renders Projects a weak feature… when it could be an extremely powerful one.

Keeping linked transactions and attachments if customer/project is updated on an invoice is straightforward logic that should have been incorporated from the beginning, imo, and it has been a very long wait for the correction. 

We need the ability to bring older invoicing into our Projects reporting and to correct the original invoicing "customer" field when needed, even after adopting Projects — mistakes can happen using Project's sub-customer design and should not be so difficult to correct. As a small business, we outsource our regular bookkeeping and I've got a lot of unusable Projects reports b/c the bookkeeper was not consistent with the customer field. I should be able to EASILY and WITHOUT LOSING TRANSACTIONS OR HISTORIC RECORDS go in and update this field to pull proper Project reporting. I can't. 

Following up on this issue as there still does not seem to be a good resolution over a year later, which is pretty unfortunate.. I am echoing everyone else’s try for help. It would be beneficial if we could link paid invoices to a project after the fact. Whether they were missed or added after it should not have to be 10 different steps to get this done. QuickBooks? We pay a lot for this software and this seems to be a pretty numerous issue people are still dealing with.

I cannot believe this is not fixed.  What a painful experience.  We are new to projects and excited to have this level of profitability visibility on our business.  But we are in the middle of our work with dozens of clients and trying to institute this in our business requires assigning paid invoices to new projects to get this set up to move forward.  I'm very interested in a fix for this and none of the workarounds are acceptable.  What a painful surprise that this is still a problem after reading through all the requests from QBO users.

I agree new to Qbo and this was the main reason for signing up and paying.

My invoices are automatically brought over from ServiceM8 which is supposed to be a partner. Every invoice / sale I do I want to track costs on each sale so was using projects.

I want every invoice to be a project to track all costs for every sale.

This is an easy fix for Qbo to make !! 

Thank you for joining the thread, advjon1.

The Project feature in QBO is not designed to automatically track the costs of invoices processed by third-party apps. It is designed to track the profitability of a project. Therefore, you can edit invoices and expense transactions from the app to tag a project to which they belong.

If you have other questions, feel free to go back to this thread.

this needs to be expedited immediately!!!! we pay premium money for this program and it is full of technical glitches..... there is no simple way to convert a invoice or estimate to a project with out losing your data?!?!?! so you have to open 2 quick book tabs and copy and paste...... 

This really needs to get solved. 

It's pretty clear that QB didn't think through this use case very well.

No business owner has the time to go creating a separate projects form before the prospect has actually paid at least a deposit on their invoice and become a client.

If anything there should be a checkbox when creating an invoice to automatically create an associated "Project"  and workflow once a partial or full payment has been recorded from the customer.  We should be able to create custom workflows inside the "Projects" based on the line items inside the project. All to happen automatically when the customer pays. 

For example, "Ordering parts" associated with a line item on the invoice. With clickable contact information and links to the vendor or sub-contractor. This way we could truly create and manage projects and put a monkey in front of the computer to help carry our the tasks. 

I don't want to have to train an employee to know that every time they see line item A that they now have to look up Vendor B and contractor C, but if they see  Line Item B then they need to email vendor C and order 27 color glossy photos. It would be sooo much easier if we could make that all happen automagically. ;-)

Which QB has the technology to do. They just need to do it. 

Adding my voice as well. We have customers that will often do POCs with our products and then convert those to projects if they decide to expand their implementation.

Being able to roll an existing invoice that started off as a POC into a project would obviously be of great benefit. 

To echo others, it seems rather ridiculous that recategorizing the invoice to fall under a project would inherently unlink the transactions associated with it. 

+1 for ability to add existing invoices from multiple customers to a project.

Currently we have been tracking internal expenses on a project for over a year, under the assumption I could add income from multiple customers to the project in order to track it. But I can't seem to add any income to the project.

The feature is half-baked and useless.

Hey all,

We are in July 2021 and the problem has not been issued yet by de dev team at Intuit.

Here is what I did to let it work for me:

I already made an est and inv, but forgot to make the project. Oke, so now I made the project. What now? My existing invoice and Estimate are not linked to it. I got the same "this will remove all links" message. 

Timely Solution: delete the invoice (note invoice number/date) > go to your estimate > change it to the project name (if the project don't get listed, which I encountered, just add : after the customer name) > and save the est. After that click create invoice from that saved estimate > and the invoice will come up correctly > now the sweet spot :) > change the invoice number to the invoice number you noted > it should save it without error. And now you have the invoice listed under the project with the original invoice number.

-- I KNOW THAT DELETING TRANSACTIONS IS SOMTEHING WE SHOULD AVOID---

--IF FEEL COMFROTABLE DOING THAT, THEN CARRY ON. ---

Let me know it this helped you resolve the issue.

DK

+1 for allowing to add previously paid invoices to a project. It's crazy this seemingly straightforward and obvious concern for small business owners has not yet been resolved. As of July 2021, if I try to add a previously paid invoice (linked to an original estimate) to a project, I get the same dreaded error that all other users have mentioned. I tried to go about it another way and link the original estimate to the project first before linking the paid invoices and that was even worse. I can't risk all that information getting deleted and having to 1) spend a ridiculous amount of time recreating years of paid invoices or 2) messing up all of our books and reconciled transactions. Please Quickbooks create a fix for this!!!

This is not the kind of service we want you to experience, NikkiFL.  

Since we have tried the possible solution above,  I suggest reaching out again to our Customer support team. They can take a look at your account and verify what causes the unexpected behavior. Here's how:  

1. Go to the Help icon.
2. Tap Talk to a human.
3. Enter "Talk to a human" again in the search bar.
4. Choose I still need a human, then click Contact us.
5. Select Get a callback or Send a message to start a conversation. 

Keep us posted on how your call goes by leaving a comment below. I'm always here to help. Stay safe always.