I have a fence project that is shared by 4 neighbors. How do i track these costs?

Hi @efk317 

thank you for reaching out to the community. Keeping track of your expenses and putting it into the right accounts is of upmost importance. 

Because this transaction falls into accounting territory, it's best to reach out to your accountant to make sure all the appropriate accounts are adjusted as they are trained on how to do this. If you don't have an accountant no need to worry, we can help. You can go to My Accountant>Find a pro to help to find an accountant in your area.

Kind regards,

Noelia

Hi efk317,

This is a great question, and I can see why it might be a bit of a complicated situation to figure out. With the way you've worded your question, I suspect you may already been looking at the Projects feature in QuickBooks Online, but you're running into trouble with how to configure it for this job since it's shared by four neighbours. I can help with directing you on this.

QuickBooks Online's Projects feature is a great option for keeping all job transactions in one place and see the related reporting. The thing with this feature, however, is that you can have only one customer per project.

If you have a situation where it's like a co-operative living community or a condo housing board situation where a single entity is paying for the project despite it involving four neighbouring properties, you could still use the Projects feature. The paying entity would be the "customer" you attribute the project to and then you can make notes on transactions if you want to be specific about which transaction is for which part of the project. Check out these articles to learn more about Projects.

• Track income, costs, and profitability by project

• Projects FAQ

• Invoice customers for project expenses

In the event that you're receiving the payments from each neighbour individually, it'll require some workarounds. You could consider simply setting up each neighbour as a customer and then tracking that way, or you may find another method works better for you. I recommend speaking with an accountant to learn the best way to handle this for your situation, your business, and your books. As Noelia highlighted, the My Accountant tab in QuickBooks Online includes a Find a pro to help button for instances where you don't have an accountant and would like to connect with a certified professional. If you do have an accountant, that tab can also be used to invite your accountant as a user to help you directly in the program.

One final option you can consider is using a third-party app through the Apps tab that's designed for project management. There may be other options that can better facilitate how you're hoping to track this information while still filtering it into QuickBooks Online. Use the search bar in that page to find what options are available.

If you'd like to leave any feedback about the Projects feature in QuickBooks, here's how you can go about that: How do I submit feedback? To stay in the know with new features, you can check out and bookmark this page: QuickBooks Online Feature and Product Updates

Take care!