How do I track labor costs by project in QuickBooks?
QuickBooks needs two things to track labor by project: projects set up in the system and time entries assigned to those projects. Without both pieces, you’re either tracking hours with nowhere to put them or tracking projects with no labor data attached.
In QuickBooks Online, enable the Projects feature from your account settings. Create a project for each job you want to track. In QuickBooks Desktop, you use the Customer:Job structure to accomplish the same thing. Either way, the project needs to exist before you can assign time to it.
Time tracking is where most businesses struggle. You need employees logging their hours against specific projects, not just total hours for the day. QuickBooks Time integrates directly and handles mobile time tracking. Employees can clock in and out with a project assigned. Other apps like Busybusy or Clockify also integrate with QuickBooks. Manual timesheet entry works for small crews that reliably fill out their hours daily.
The accuracy depends entirely on your crew’s discipline. If someone enters 8 hours without specifying which project, you have data but no useful information. If they forget which job they worked on by Friday, the allocation becomes a guess. Daily time entry assigned to the correct project is the only approach that produces reliable data.
Payroll integration is what converts hours into actual labor costs. When QuickBooks Payroll or an integrated provider like Gusto runs, it allocates wages based on the time entries. The labor cost hits each project proportionally based on hours worked. Without this integration, you’re tracking hours but not dollars.
If you’re not using integrated payroll, you can manually allocate labor costs. Create journal entries that distribute payroll expense across projects based on your time records. This works but requires more effort and introduces more room for error.
Once everything is connected, run project profitability reports. QuickBooks shows you revenue, labor costs, materials, and other expenses by project. You can finally see which jobs actually made money and which ones cost more than they brought in. This is the foundation of real job costing for contractors.
Common mistakes include not creating projects before entering transactions, forgetting to assign time entries to the right project, and not reconciling time data before running payroll. These errors compound quickly and make your reports unreliable.
If you’re already using QuickBooks but your labor costs aren’t broken out by project, the problem is usually setup or workflow discipline. A QuickBooks bookkeeper in Santa Fe can configure the system correctly and help establish processes that get accurate data from your crew consistently.
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More Questions
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A project is profitable when revenue exceeds all costs including allocated overhead. Most contractors undercount costs by missing their own time, vehicle use, and overhead allocation, making jobs look more profitable than they are.
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Your estimates are probably off because you don't have accurate data on what past jobs actually cost. Without tracking actuals against estimates, you keep repeating the same mistakes on every bid.
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Job costing tracks every cost against the specific project that incurred it so you know which jobs make money. Setup requires defining cost categories, configuring your accounting software for project tracking, and establishing consistent processes for capturing labor and expenses.
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For most small to mid-size contractors, QuickBooks Online is the standard. It handles job costing, integrates with common tools, and every accountant knows how to work with it. The key is setting it up correctly for contractor needs.
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