Payroll Expenses drop down in Projects not working as expected.

Hi AlbertD,

I really appreciate how you stated the details of your concern. As you said, this has been brought up with our Support team. With that, I recommend contacting them again so they can take further action on this case. They have tools to check this issue.

If you have other questions, you can go back to this thread.

Hi Jess - I appreciate your response. Unfortunately, the VIP support line only opens the case, then transfers to another agent who then hangs up on us. We wasted 4 hours being transferred by QBO team to the TSheets team who then transfers to the QBO Payroll team who then hangs up on us. We've been at this for a week and can't get a single QB Employee or VIP folks to help us with this issue. Again, this issue isn't being resolved by anyone at Intuit or QB, they just open and close the cases with no ability to call back, hence the reason I'm now asking the community. We've experience one product group blaming other product groups. We need someone who can debug the issue and offer a resolution how to get the product to work as advertised.

Can you show me how to get this feature working?

I do not have a solution unfortunately because we too purchased QBO Advance and the corresponding t-sheet program for these same reasons and have been very disappointed.  Not only can I not get the job costing section to work, but I was also informed by our payroll setup expert that I can no longer point my payroll items to specific (or any) cost of goods sold categories I used for years in desktop.  I now have to figure out how to run reports to gather labor costs, then enter journal entries on every payroll to move the labor to the cost of goods categories.  and that long process only solves my P&L issue. 

The whole reason we moved to QBO Advance was that they advertised the job costing capabilities.  

I will keep checking this thread to see if anyone has found a way to make this work.  If not, I may give up and move my client back to the desktop. I am really grateful I only moved a single client as a test case as the process has been a nightmare.

Since my post over a year ago the QB Team still cannot demonstrate how to get Advanced working like their video. Calling their help desk, no matter what tier of support they transfer you to, will not help either. And unfortunately, you will not find a QB Team Member replying to this thread with a solution, projected timelines for when it will work like the video, etc.

That said, after a year of using Projects for cost objectives/job costing/labor pools, I have discovered many things that work and a few things that do not work. Things that work will always show up on your report "P&L by Customer" and under "Projects" nicely. Things that do not work will always show up under report "P&L by Customer" as a Customer labeled "Not Specified" which is the last column before "Total" to the right.

Things that do not work (again, found under the "Not Specified" Customer left of "Total"):

1. Company Contributions for employees, for instance Retirement or Health Insurance matching, will always show up under "Not Specified." Since payroll/paycheck/direct deposit is an immutable expense in QBO (cannot be edited), you cannot edit and reassign from "Not Specified" to a named Project.

2. Employer Taxes (FUTA, SS, Medi, SUI, etc.) associated with Paid Time Off for employees will always show up in "Not Specified" and cannot be reassigned from "Not Specified" to a named Project.

3. Wages associated with Paid Time Off for employees will always show up in "Not Specified" and cannot be reassigned from "Not Specified" to a named Project.

Things that do work (costed to a Project): everything else assigned to Project, i.e., Payables and Receivables - everything in your COA.

Under Projects, you will find that using "Hourly Cost" is super basic. You will need to assign hourly cost rates to each employee. When you have different rates for different Projects for the same employee, like most consulting firms, then you cannot use the "Hourly Cost" feature at all, because what you pay is not what you bill - and we need to track different bill rates per employee per project/client.

The Hourly Cost view could use a refactor in my opinion since what they are trying to offer in Advanced is the cost of a unit of labor before profit is applied to yield a sale price (e.g., a wrap rate of sorts). If they want to offer a wrap rate, then it would be better to add a wrap rate feature with indirect labor pool support and work breakdown structures.

I have found the Payroll Expenses view is integrated with TSheets/QBO Advances/Intuit Payroll and therefore more realistic and accurate for Job Costing. From my perspective, if the QB Team can fix the three items mentioned above, then we'll have a 100% basic solution for Job Costing when using P&L by Customers as Cost Objectives.

Hope this helps. -A

A client of mine is having a similar issue. According to this article, paychecks are not supposed to be showing in the Project Profitability report when Hourly Costs is the Labor Costing Method. However, my client says that it had changed recently and I can confirm that paychecks are now showing for projects even when changing to this method whereas before they were not. 

She has contacted support a couple times already and has been disconnected by one on chat and the 2nd one by phone couldn't even identify (understand) the issue nor show any existing case created from the first chat. 

Hi Go Get Geek,

I appreciate the screenshot and the details of your concern. However, it would be best if your client can reach out to our Support team again so they can start a screen-sharing session to check this behavior. They are available from 6 AM to 6 PM PT.

On the other hand, you can submit feedback about the changes by going to the Gear icon and choosing Feedback,

If you have any other concerns, feel free to go back to this thread.

I contacted support myself. It's a known bug. The Engineering team opened a ticket on 9/14/22 so it is relatively new, and they are still investigating it and trying to figure out how to fix it. This is their ticket number: INV-76976. 

I am experiencing this issue as well.  I am wondering if there ever was a solution found?   

Thanks for joining the thread, @bmckee18.

I'm happy to provide insights regarding the drop-down options displayed in the Project menu.

The reason you're unable to see the Payroll Expenses account under the Expenses drop-down list is because the Project menu in the video is using an old interface. Due to recent updates in QuickBooks, the Payroll Expenses are now displayed in a different interface, specifically under the Employee rate section.

For our latest video about tracking your labor costs and profitability in QuickBooks Online Plus, Advanced, and Accountant, please check this article: Track hourly labor costs and profitability by project in QBO.

For additional reference about creating and managing projects, you can refer to this resource: How to add project income, expenses, labor costs, and run project-specific reports from a single das....

Tap the Reply button if you have additional concerns or clarifications when tracking projects in the program. I'll be happy to assist you anytime.