How to set up projects in QuickBooks Online

Check your plan. Intuit names QuickBooks Online Plus and QuickBooks Online Advanced as the plans that can use projects to track the income and costs of particular jobs.

Be clear on what a project is for. It pulls together the separate transactions, quotes and expenses that relate to a single job for one customer, gives you a dashboard to see them, and lets you run reports for that project alone to watch how it's tracking. Intuit's example is a car repair business setting up one project per vehicle repair, so every part and hour of labour for that job sits together.

Have the customer in QuickBooks first, because each project is linked to a customer chosen from a dropdown. Details already saved on the customer, such as their email and addresses, then fill in for you on the project.

Projects also have to be switched on in your settings before you can create one, which is where the steps below begin.

1. Go to Settings and select Account and settings.
2. Select Advanced, and in the Projects section, turn on Organise all job-related activity in one place.
3. Go to All apps, then Projects, then Projects.
4. Select New project. The first time, the button is labelled Start a project.
5. Type a name in the Project name field.
6. Choose the customer from the Customer dropdown, and enter an Email for them if it hasn't appeared already.
7. Enter the project's Start date and End date.
8. Pick a status from the Project Status dropdown, and use the Notes field for anything else worth recording.
9. For a billing and shipping address specific to this project, turn on Address for this project, choose a country from the Country dropdown and enter the address. If the shipping address isn't the same as the billing one, untick Same as billing address and type the shipping details.
10. Select Save.

The project appears in your projects list, but nothing is in it yet. It fills up only as you assign transactions to it, and the Add to project dropdown is how you add or create them from the project itself. Once work is flowing through it, the project's dashboard shows the related transactions in one view and its reports give you that job's results on their own.

In QuickBooks Online Advanced only, the Add to project dropdown also offers Project quote. A project cost quote forecasts the costs and income of the products and services a job needs. You can send it to the customer without them seeing your costs or profit margin, convert it to an invoice once they accept it, and later compare the forecast with what really happened in the project's Quotes vs. actuals report.

If there's no way to create a project, go back to the Projects section on the Advanced tab of Account and settings and check that Organise all job-related activity in one place is turned on, since project tracking has to be enabled first. Projects belong to QuickBooks Online Plus and Advanced, so check which plan you're on as well.