QuickBooks for contractors: job costing, set up right
QuickBooks Online can do basic job costing — and plenty of contractors run on it. Here's how to set it up, where it falls short for construction, and how to get real-time profit without giving up your books.
How job costing works in QuickBooks Online
- You need QuickBooks Online Plus or Advanced — Projects isn't in lower tiers.
- Turn on Projects, then create a project per job.
- Tag every income and expense transaction to the right project as it comes in.
- Open the Project to see income, costs, and profit for that job.
Done consistently, that gives you a project-profit number. The hard part is the “consistently.”
Where it falls short for construction
- No construction cost codes. QuickBooks thinks in accounts and projects, not the materials / labor / subs / equipment breakdown you estimate against.
- It's manual. Every transaction has to be hand-tagged to a project, every week, or the numbers drift.
- No estimate-vs-actual by phase. You can't easily see a job tracking against the budget you bid, line by line.
- It's after-the-fact. You learn whether a job made money once the books are reconciled — not while you can still act.
Keep QuickBooks — add real-time profit on top
You don't have to choose. Keep QuickBooks Online as your system of record for accounting, and let Sevyn be your job-cost and real-time profit layer: it pulls your actual costs from your bank, matches each to the right job through your purchase orders, tracks every job against its estimate, and pushes a clean copy back to QuickBooks for your accountant — no weekly tagging.
FAQ
Can you do job costing in QuickBooks Online?
Yes, on QuickBooks Online Plus and Advanced you can turn on Projects and tag income and expenses to a project to see project profitability. It works, but it depends on tagging every transaction to the right project, and it has no construction cost codes (materials/labor/subs/equipment) out of the box.
What's the catch with QuickBooks job costing for contractors?
Three things: it's manual (you hand-tag every transaction to a project, weekly, or reports drift), it's not construction-shaped (no real cost codes or estimate-vs-actual by phase), and it's after-the-fact (you see project profit once the books are reconciled, not in real time).
Do I have to leave QuickBooks to get real job costing?
No. Keep QuickBooks Online as your books. Sevyn sits on top as your job-cost and real-time profit layer — it pulls costs from your bank, matches them to the right job, and pushes a clean copy back to QuickBooks for your accountant.