Project Profitability by Time Costs Report - Overview

Hi FairBrotherA, 

What an excellent question! Thank you for the detail. 

As the project function is relatively new to QuickBooks Online, there's room for improvement on project reporting.

At the moment, project report can only be access in the project tab and time cost column is not available. You can consider using Time Activities reports such as Time Activities by Customer Detail and Time Activities by Employee Detail in the report tab to access relevant data, however, project is not tracked on those reports unless you have Class or Location assigned to project as well. 

I would encourage you to submit an in-product feedback for this, so we can continue on improving our product and service for you. Here is how:

How do I submit feedback?

- https://quickbooks.intuit.com/learn-support/en-us/feature-preferences/how-do-i-submit-feedback/00/18...

Thanks Zac,

Unfortunately these reports don't give me quite the information I'm looking for, I have logged a feedback request as suggested.

Is there a report that would show me even just my time costs in any format? Not just time activities? 

Thank you for the feedback FairBrotherA, 

Please give this a try:

Projects tab

- Click on the name of the project 

- Under overview, 

- Look under "Costs"

- Click on " Hourly time cost"

Please let us know if this report gives you what you were looking for. 

Thank you. 

Hi Zac,

Thank you again for your input, unfortunately this still requires us to go project by project to attain this information; with 60+ projects active at any time this just isn't a feasible solution.  We really need a report that will give us a complete overview of current active projects. 

I have provided feedback as suggested. Is there any way to track how this feedback is received and if it is actioned or in the pipeline for an action on a later release? 

Hi FairbrotherA,

Sorry to hear that this was not a solution for you. Thank you for providing the feedback to our development team that is much appreciated.

At this stage, the in-product feedback request is just for our product development team to understand the common and recurring enhancement request.

In terms of ongoing communication, we do not currently have that option, love the idea though and will make a recommendation.

Thank you for your understanding.

Terina

Hi,

I own an engineering consultancy and need exactly the same functionality.

We have between 20 to 30 projects happening at once and it is very time consuming and tedious having to look at profitability on each project's screen.

We would like to be able to prepare a report that lists

Project name

project comment

Customer

Income, with list of invoices linked to project

Costs, with break down of bills and time

Profit or Loss

Project Status (ongoing or complete)

And being able to sort that by project name, customer, profit, loss, etc would aslo be very useful (although we could at least export this to XL and do it there if needed).

Right now we do use projects, 

We would also like to be able to add a project manager name to projects.  This would be my companies employee who is managing the project, and that should be another field that can be sorted by.  This would allow us to track our staff's performance also.

As a work around, what report can I export to Excel that would allow me to at least sort in this way?

Thanks

Paul

Director, Pavement Asset Services P/L

HI PaulM_PAS

To answer your last question, yes a 'project manager' can be assigned out of the list of current users who have Company Admin status which would allow them to create new projects on their own, or assign it to you in the interim either way allowing control and owner to the one assigned. 

With your above points I will use your words and submit this as feedback to our product team as a future product enhancement. Currently our Project reports consist of Project profitability, Time cost by employee or supplier and Unbilled time and expenses which don't currently consist of the project managers name but as you mentioned above can be used to show income and costs breakdowns. In regards to list of invoices associated, you can run a Project profitability report then by clicking 'Sales' drill down into the balance which would consist of only invoices tied to the project, displaying the project name under the 'Name' column.
 

Similarly, you can use the Unbilled time and expenses report, including the time spend on employees or suppliers in the Time cost by employee or supplier which can both be exported to excel or PDF. This includes reports mentioned above to be exported to excel to be able to add in the project managers name. 

Let me know if you have any further questions or points I missed.

Thanks,

-Steven

Hi Steven,

Thanks for that update.

We assign projects to staff members who are not Directors /Finance Staff and can't be given full QB access.  But that item is a nice to have, and for our use, it really just needs to be a text field, as Directors/finance staff will continue to create new projects and those functions.

The main thing we are seeking is a report that outputs the following items, for a specified date range:

Project Name - Comments - Client - Income - Expenses (which may be a employee time cost and an other cost for lump sum costs like subcontractors, fuel, etc) - Profit

I envisage it would look like the "Sales by customer report", except it would be grouped by Project Title field, not the Customer field.

This would be invaluable, as essentially our business wins specific project contracts for different clients and then we either make a profit or loss on a per project basis.

I'm aware of how the project level reporting works, which is great.  But there doesn't seem to be a global report template that presents a summary of the items above across all projects(?).

Thanks

Paul

Thanks for the quick reply, 

Currently within our product the closest we can do for that reporting style is a Sales by Customer Report, which in turn you could then filter to ensure that the specific project is found. However even this doesn't show the information such as notes or client's as you outlined above. This extends also to that currently we do not have a globally report template also that would encompass all the above details of the projects under one report, 

I believe you've given us a lot of great product feedback to go off on which I am now in the process of notifying the product team. Moving forward the best approach would be to export the info via CSV which would then allow you to create you own personalised template that best reflects the information, 

Let me know if I can be of any more assistance.

-Steven

I don't want to sound like a jerk but its now 2023 and projects is still a complete joke. Might be good for freelancers who run 2-3 projects a year but for actual serious companies using your product its almost as bad as Xero projects.

Hi Wilson Design and Build,

I appreciate your sharing thoughts about the current options available using the Projects feature in QuickBooks Online.

We take customers’ suggestions as an opportunity to guide us on which area of the product we need to improve on. On your behalf, I’m passing this one on my end for consideration in future enhancements.

You can also visit the QBO Blog and register to our Newsletter to receive email updates about the product and the latest applications added in QBO.

If there's anything I can help you with QuickBooks Online, please let me know. I'm always around here in the Intuit Community to help.

Hello, yes, I do get the product updates.

I just want you and your team to understand how UNBELIVABLY frustrating it is to be a QBO user, a QBTime elite user and STILL not be able to get a report from the system about how much a job costs.

All because there is no simple report to combine the COGS and the Hourly Costs amounts (hours inputted from QB Time into payroll).

I can see people have been asking for it for a long time. It is sad it has not been added.

Hi there Wilson Design and Build,

I agree with what you're saying here. I can see how having the abilities you're looking for would be beneficial to you and other users. I'll be sure to pass your suggestions along to the Product Development Team. The more feedback we receive on the same topic the better the chances of that being implemented in the future.

Please leave a comment below if you have additional questions, I'll be around to help. Have a great day!