QBO just dont get project budgets. This is because they are an accountant centric organisation. They are not business led, despite the adverts. Its also clear in the software which is hugely complex to use as a small professional services business owner. To work around this issue of tracking projects, I have to create a separate excel sheet with my project budget. Each week I then extract the time allocated to each project from QBO and import that into my excel which then tells me how many days i have left on the project. Its a very simple concept for QBO to implement. But why would QBO want to support  small professional services businesses. They just dont get it. There must be a better alternative than QBO.

Would have to say here that QBO blows Xero away in terms of reporting and reconciliation reporting.

I am a heavy XERO user and it's a great platform for general booking and accounting - it also has the best App Store.

However, the biggest drawback with Xero Projects is that its impossible to find unassigned transactions. There is no way to run a report to track down errant expenses and make sure they are included in the relevant project (either for P&L analysis or re-billing). This makes the Project module effectively unusable if re-billing of expenses is a key part of the business model.

QBO at least has the ability to run a transaction report and easily ID (and then assign) transactions that haven't previously been assigned to a project. You can save a customized report template and run it daily to easily find-and-assign all cost transactions.  

I agree, having a project option for managing the costs is great but attaching a budget to it does help enormously, saves a lot of double entry points. The budgeting currently is to complicated, almost useless when you cant add a budget to the project. I would expect better from QB frankly.