Why do hourly time cost in projects isn't tracking to expense?

Hello Mee1977

To confirm are you saying the rime activity in the project is not posting to a expense account?Could you provide a screen shot of the transactions in the project so we can look at this further 

Thanks

Emma

The time cost isn't shown in expenses.

Hi there, Mee1977.

Time costs added in the Projects section will not show up in your Dashboard as actual expenses. They will only be added if they're used in a sale (bill or bill payments for supplier) or expense type transaction (payroll for employees). Here's an article for more details: Track Income, Costs, And Profitability By Project.

Although, you can run the Time Activity report under the Project to see how much time are spent on a particular project.

Let me know if you need more help.

I have a related question on this: I see the hourly time cost for my contractors inside a Project, then I ALSO see the Expense (entered from actually paying the contractors) under the cost of goods sold. Isn't this double counting these costs?  Is there any way to "match" these transactions? Or do I simply understand that my profitability is understated here and run the "Project Profitability w/o Time Costs" report?

Any insight is much appreciated!!

Thanks for joining us here, eas22487.

The amounts reported in Hourly Time Cost section come from the time entries you've made under the project. They're not actual expenses, especially if these time entries are not billed or invoiced yet. 

The amounts in the Expense section on the other hand represents the actual transactions affecting or using the COGS account. In your case, they're from the payments made to your contractors. You'll want to run the Project Profitability w/o Time Costs report to see the amount of the actual expense per project. 

For now, we're unable to match these transactions under the Project Center. However, you can run the Time Cost by Employee or Supplier report and Transaction List by Vendor to compare the amounts. Just go to the Project Reports tab to open the time cost report, then look for Transaction List by Vendor in the Reports menu.

Please add another reply below if you have any other questions. 

You really should figure out how to do this ASAP because it makes the Projects view rather misleading. Almost all of my projects are purely labor and if you switch it to the time costs view its almost guaranteed to show a negative profit because we've tracked out vendor labor hours _and_ paid them which counts as an expense.

So that view seems entirely redundant if you can't actually draw down on what the project thinks is outstanding expenses.

This seems like a fairly half implemented feature at this point. 

I am having the same issue. Mine is an vendor/1099 employer of mine. I need it to show as an expense for the job. It shows under my employees info but not for the job I paid him on. What can I do to fix this?

Hello, Strebor129. 

Thank you for reaching out to the Community. Let's check your Vendor Details setting to double-check the default account of your vendor. Here's how to do it:  

1. Click Expenses and choose Vendors. 
2. Select the vendors name, and press Edit. 
3. Under Default expense account, drop-down arrow and choose the expense account. 
4. Tap Save.  

If the same thing happens, I'd recommend reaching out to our Customer Care Support Team. This way, they can take a closer look into your specific account in a screen sharing mode and determine the reason why it doesn't show the expense account in the job. 

You may also refer to this article for more information about: Track income, costs, and profitability by project. 

Don't hesitate to tag me in your comment if you have any other concerns. I'll be here to help you. Stay safe!

Something has definitely changed in the project cost tracking. All of my contractor payments used to tabulate in the expenses of the individual project the bill was marked for. This gave me a true expense of the project, in addition to all job supplies. Out of nowhere, I had projects go from showing $570k in expenses to $188k in expenses. This makes the project tracking tab all but useless. They need to revert back to the way it was so we can keep an accurate running tab of project margin without having to add up all individual expenses in excel.

Hi @PinnacleHomeBuilding,

Allow me to clear things up for you about the Project profitability report in QuickBooks Online (QBO).

The first thing I can suggest is to ensure that the transactions in question are under the correct project. Next, when you run the Project profitability report, set the Accounting method to Accrual.

If you have other questions about the Projects feature, see this article: Projects FAQ. It's a list of common questions about the feature, along with their answers. 

Post a reply below if you have other concerns, and I'll be sure to get back to you.