How do I track jobs in QuickBooks Online?
QuickBooks Online tracks jobs through the Projects feature. You enable it in settings, create a project for each job you want to track, and then assign every related transaction to that project. When done consistently, you can see exactly how much revenue came in and how much you spent on each job.
To turn on Projects, click the gear icon for Settings, go to Account and Settings, then Advanced. Find the setting for organizing transactions by project and enable it. Once active, Projects appears in your left navigation menu where you can create and manage individual jobs.
Each project gets linked to a customer. When you create a new project, you assign it to the customer you’re doing the work for. This connects all the project’s financial activity to that customer relationship. You can add project notes, update status, and track progress from start to finish.
The work that actually matters is assigning transactions to the right project every single time. When you create an invoice for that job, tag it to the project. When you enter a bill for materials, assign it to the project. When you record an expense or log time, connect it to the project. Miss transactions and your profitability numbers become meaningless.
QBO gives you a Project Profitability report that shows income minus expenses for each job. For simple service businesses or small jobs, this tells you what you need to know. You can see at a glance which projects made money and which ones didn’t.
Contractors running larger jobs often need more than QBO’s native Projects can deliver. If you want to break a job into phases like foundation, framing, and finish work, or use cost codes to separate labor from materials from subcontractors, the Projects feature alone won’t do it. You’ll need to get creative with classes and sub-projects, use construction-specific apps that integrate with QBO, or work with a bookkeeper in American Fork who understands how to configure QBO for real construction job costing.
The software features matter less than the discipline to use them. A contractor who tags every transaction to the right job with basic QBO will have better data than one using expensive software inconsistently. Pick a system, use it on everything, and reconcile weekly so you catch mistakes while you still remember what happened.
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