Job Costing, Profitability Report

Hi there, dwit. Thanks for posting in the Community.

Setting up a service item will only show the cost on your Job Profitability report if you created a bill marked as billable to a customer. When you enter an expense transaction on the bill or check window, you'll need to select the customer to be billed for the service.

To learn more about how job cost works in QuickBooks Desktop, read this article: Tracking job costs in QuickBooks Desktop.

If you have any other questions, let me know by commenting below. Have a great day!

We do post the customer to the job when entering time in the timesheet, we just do not "bill" or invoice the customer from the timesheet. We enter the Service and estimated hours "quantity" on the invoice. This all works fine. The problem is that I can not run a report that I know of that shows me actual hours vs estimated hours. I can only see actual $ vs estimated $. 

Thanks for coming back, @dwit. At the moment, the report that shows actual vs estimated hours isn't available in QuickBooks. 

It'd be nice to have this feature in our future update. Don't worry, I'll pass this along to our engineers to let them know of your insights. Letting us know what works best for you and your business will show our developers what they need and consider to improve. 

In the meantime, visit and check out our blog site to see what's new in QBO. 

I'll be right here to listen and answer if you have more questions. Take care.