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Create projects in QuickBooks Online or Intuit Enterprise Suite

by Intuit•720• Updated a day ago

Create a project to group individual transactions, estimates, and expenses associated with a single customer in one place. This provides a centralized dashboard to view associated transactions and run project-specific reports to monitor your bottom line.

If you have QuickBooks Online Plus, QuickBooks Online Advanced, or Intuit Enterprise Suite, you can use projects to track income and costs for specific projects.

For example: If you own an automotive repair shop, you can create a project for a specific vehicle repair to track every part and labor hour dedicated to that single job.

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If you have QuickBooks Online Plus or Advanced you can use Projects to track income and costs for specific projects, or across multiple projects, so you can measure profitability. Let’s go over how to set up projects and then assign income and costs to a project. We’ll also cover how to add labor costs to your project. To start, go to Business overview…Projects. Note that your navigation may look like this. Select New project. Enter a project name and select the customer you’re doing the work for. If you don’t see your customer here you can add them. You can also change this later if you change your mind. The Start and End date are optional. You can edit the project later and add them when you begin and end work on the project. By default, projects start “In progress” but you can choose a different status. And then enter any additional notes. Select Save when you’re done. Now you’ve set up a project. There’s no info in here yet, but that will change as you record transactions. As you record new transactions, like estimates and invoices, select the Project from the Customer field. Then fill out the rest of the transaction like you normally would. There are a couple ways to assign costs to a project. Go to your transactions and when you see one that is for a project, open it and select the project in the Customer field. If you want to include it on a future invoice, select the billable box. You can also assign costs when you record a bill, a check or an expense manually. Just select the project in the Customer/Project field. Once you save, you can see the expense assigned to your project. These numbers will update as you add more income and expenses to your projects. If you use QuickBooks Online Advanced, you can also set up project estimates and track your estimate versus actuals on the project dashboard and reports. Check out this video to learn more about project estimates. When you’ve completed a project you’ll see your total income, expenses and profit margin. You can also mark the project completed so you’ll have more room on the Projects page. If you want to see this project again select Completed under Status. Check out this video to learn more about project reports. Now you can set up your own projects in QuickBooks and start tracking their profitability.

What you’ll need

An active QuickBooks Online, Intuit Enterprise Suite, or QuickBooks Online Accountant subscription.
If you use QuickBooks Online or Intuit Enterprise Suite, in Account & settings, select Advanced and turn on Organize all job-related activity in one place. Turn on Retainage and map the Retainage Receivable and Retainage Payable accounts in your chart of accounts.
If you use QuickBooks Online Accountant, in Account & settings, turn on Use project financial tracking.
Note: Once you turn this on, you can no longer turn it off.

Turn on projects

Before you can track specific repairs or jobs, you must enable project tracking in your settings.

QuickBooks Online or Intuit Enterprise Suite: Go to Account & settings, select Advanced, and turn on Organize all job-related activity in one place.
QuickBooks Online Accountant: Go to Account & settings and turn on Use project financial tracking.

Note: Once enabled in QuickBooks Online Accountant, this feature cannot be turned off.

Create a new project

Go to All apps , then Projects, then Projects (Take me there).
Select New project.
In the Project name field, enter the project name.
Select a customer from the Customer ▼ dropdown. This automatically adds the customer's Email, Billing address, and Shipping address. If you haven’t added this info, you’ll need to add it.
If needed, change or add an Email specific to this project.
Enter a Start date and End date for the project.
Select a project status from the Status dropdown. Projects default to In progress.
In the Billing address section, you can change or add billing details specific to this project.
If the shipping address is different than the customer's billing address, clear the Same as billing address checkbox. Then enter the correct shipping details.
For Intuit Enterprise Suite or QuickBooks Online Advanced with the construction add-on:
- In the Project costing section, choose Basic or Detailed. If you pick Detailed, you can't switch back to Basic. Learn about how to manage project budgets, including costing.
- In the Phases section, select the +Add phase button to create milestones for the project work. You can enter a name, description, start and end dates, and set the status.
Select Save.

Note: You can also add more project info in the Notes field.

Results

Your project will now be listed.

Next steps

Once you’ve created a project, it'll remain empty until you add or create transactions to assign it. You can add transactions to a project by selecting the Add to project ▼ dropdown.