We use Project Cost accounting and the Estimate versus Actual reports on a daily basis. Most of our projects consist of estimates for equipment, freight and labor. My question surrounds ensuring the actual costs are reporting against the corresponding estimate line.
For equipment and freight this is generally not an issue as the actual costs are generally coming from purchase orders, bills or inventory, all of which require we input a Product/Service and Description (which corresponds to the estimate descriptions).
The issue surrounds labor costs. We use ADP which requires us to input payroll costs into QBO via a journal entry. Since the journal entry format does not include Product/Service and Description, any costs associated with the journal entry are assigned to a line by themselves on the Estimate report and do not have any description. I'm assuming that a Product/Service description is needed to assign these costs to the corresponding line. Ultimately the bottom line is correct but the report would be more useful if the actual costs lined up with the estimated costs. Is there a step I am missing?
I did find a workaround which is to enter the payroll costs via a dummy bill (which requires the Product/Service information) which assigns the costs to the correct estimate line but this is inefficient and just adds anther step to the process.
Any insight would be appreciated.
