Quickbooks Online, terminated employees cause projects to not close

Hello @rachel. Thank you for coming to the Community with this issue. I'd be happy to explain in further detail what you're experiencing. 

Like you already stated, if there's any time activity on the Project, it won't allow you to delete that project and you get that error you're seeing. The reason for this is that those timesheets have that Project linked to them, and deleting that Project would leave those timesheets with an empty Project field since it doesn't exist. Although this is intended behavior in QuickBooks Online, I completely understand wanting to clear up your Projects once they're done. Here are a couple of options for you:

• Mark these Projects as completed or canceled. This QBO's version of 'closing out' a Project.
• If it's a matter of simplifying your view of active Projects, you can adjust the filter on the Projects page to only view 'In Progress' Projects.

Since this is a pain point for you, you should definitely submit feedback to our developers. Here's an article that walks you through how to do this: How do I submit feedback?

Thank you for taking the time to give us this feedback, it's truly appreciated.

Thank you @K_Siman for taking the time to explain.  This is DEFINITELY a pain point.  I have submitted feedback.  The real issue is I cannot inactivate customers without first deleting the project.  We do a LOT of projects, which then ALL show up in QBTime and make it very cumbersome for employees to use.  It's also unclear if a job is completely closed out when I cannot inactivate it.  Again, having customer's delete the time off these projects this is really not a great answer.  It seems very counter intuitive to create projects to help with profitability reports, only then to have the customers delete the very thing they were looking for reports on in the first place.  If the project has to be reopened for another invoice or more time costs, the ability to run reports is gone because the time is removed from the project.  To run those reports, you would have to pull a time report from QBTime, and manually calculate the the cost of wages paying attention specifically to overtime, extra hourly wages, etc.  Again, making more work for the customer to use projects, which is supposed to HELP not create more work.  :(

I'm happy I was able to provide a little clarification, @rachel. I understand this doesn't solve your problem but hopefully gives a little insight into the reasoning behind this feature. 

I really do appreciate you taking the time to submit feedback as well. I know our developers look at different trends and requests that are submitted, so it's important for our customers to let us know what isn't working. It's also pretty safe to say you aren't the only one that feels this way about Projects. 

Thank you again, and please never hesitate to ask any questions in the Community. Everyone here is always eager to help.