Project cost and income do not display even though transactions are present

Hello there, @GSDgrad.

I'm here to share information about managing Projects in QuickBooks Online.

For the transactions, make sure to assign them to a specific project. If you add them to a customer or vendor, they will not generate data like income, expense, and project profitability. 

You can easily add new transactions to your project, such as invoices, expenses, or estimates. Adding transactions to projects won't affect their classification or impact on your accounts. Simply designating them as part of the project allows you to keep track of its revenues and outlays.

There are two methods to add new transactions. In QuickBooks, you can create the transaction as usual. All you have to do is type the project name into the Customer/Project dropdown. Or, use this method for starting a new transaction inside of projects:

1. Go to Business overview and select Projects.
2. Choose your project.
3. Click Add to project to create a new transaction.
4. Select either Invoice, Receive Payment, Expense, Estimate, Time, or Bill.
5. Fill out the details for the transaction as you normally would.
6. Hit Save and close.

Once you have the same issue after properly assigning the transactions to the project, you can clear your regular web browser's browsing history.

I'm also adding this article as your reference to manage projects in QuickBooks Online: Set up and create projects in QuickBooks Online.

Let me know if you have additional questions about managing projects. I'm always here to help.

Hello GSDgrad,

I have reviewed the solution you’ve shared and it's correct and accurate. Thank you for sharing your inputs to help address the issue.

We love to see members supporting one another! Have a great day. 

After reading all these responses with no results, I finally figured out that you need to show "accrual" (not cash) for unpaid invoices or expenses to show on the project report.    

This comment helped my resolve the same issue in QB. My contractors were under expenses in my chart of accounts. But the detail type was 'payroll expenses' and I had to change it to 'cost of labor' to get it to show up in the costs section. 

Just coming back to QBO after a few years and finding out that the projects feature is basically useless.

None of the responses or replies in this thread truly solve the problem with QBO Projects. For years now, I have projects in QBO that simply will not show/capture any vendor expense, and these are vendor expenses that have been entered correctly as bills and assigned to the exact project and customer. QBO will show when I have been paid by the customer, so the end result is that these projects show "100%" profit on the Projects page. Ah....if only that were true. I've cleared the cache, cleared the intuit cookies, all to no avail. Its useless data we're paying for.

Your issue seems exactly like mine.

Are you certain that the Account Type for your expense transactions are setup as: Expenses, Cost of Goods Sold, etc? In my experience, your Vendor expenses must be setup with one of the expense Account Types (see attached). Any expense with Account Type: Asset, Equity, A/R, Income will not hit your Project as an Expense and therefore will not show up as a Project Cost. I suggest opening one of your expense accounts in Chart of Accounts and checking the Account Type. As a test, you could create a temporary expense account that uses Cost of Goods, Cost of Labor, Expense, etc. as the Account Type and then add a fake transaction to one of your Projects with this temp expense. Then check your Project Summary to see if it showed up as an Expense to the Project.

Hello there, @Semper1. We'll point you in the right direction to help you address this situation and show expenses in your project inside QuickBooks Online (QBO.

Before anything else, know we recognize the importance of this matter and that this isn't the experience we want you to have when using the program. Since you've already performed basic browser troubleshooting on your end, but still the issue persists. It's best to contact our Customer Care Team so they can access and conduct further investigation on your account to determine the root cause of the problem. We'll write input the steps below to get you going:

1. Sign in to your QuickBooks Online company.
2. Select Help (?).
3. Select either tab to get started:

• Assistant: Get quick, personalized answers. Select a suggested option, or type a question or topic you need help with. If you decide you need further help, you can still Talk to a human.
• Search: Search the QuickBooks Online knowledge base directly, or select Contact Us and choose a way to connect with us:
  • Start a chat with a support expert.
  • Get a callback from the next available expert.

Feel free to check this page for support availability: QuickBooks Online Support.

On the other hand, we have these articles to help you manage projects and ensure every transaction entered inside the program is on point:

• Create and manage projects in QuickBooks Online.
• Run reports in QuickBooks Online.

We're determined to help you resolve this situation, @Semper1. Please don't hesitate to comment below if you need further assistance handling project transactions. We'll be around to help you out. Stay safe.

I was having the same issue where expenses were not pulling into the Project P&L, but showed as transactions within the project. The account type I was having an issue with was Payroll Expense. I changed the account type to Other Business Expense and the transactions appeared correctly.

Intuit - maybe you could give us some clear, detailed information about this so we don't have to guess.

Hello, 

I am having a problem where the cost displayed on the projects overview page does not match the cost number on the job when I open it up. I can not figure out what is causing this. Some jobs are off a couple thousand dollars and some are off more than $100K. Have you had any experience with this? I have spent nearly 10 hours on the phone with QB and they have "escalated" it to "tier 3" and no one is following up with me. They say to "wait for the next update." I don't know where to go from here. Thank you.

I appreciate your effort in having your project issue sorted out, TCM99. And I also recognize the urgency of fixing this so you can get back in working order.

Currently, we have an ongoing investigation (INV-107945) about the inability to see the expenses reflected in the cost of the project. Our product engineers are working on a solution promptly.

I'm well aware that you have contacted our QuickBooks Online Support team. However, I'd still recommend contacting them again to add you to the list of affected users and receive email updates once it's available.

Furthermore, you can check out this article to learn how to run basic reports: Run reports in QuickBooks Online.

Let me know if you have any further questions about project-related concerns. I'm here to assist you 24/7.