QuickBooks Online payroll costs not showing in projects: 4 fixes

Intuit’s current help pages call its payroll product Intuit QuickBooks Workforce. The steps below use the names on those pages.

Which labor method is your project showing?

Every project shows labor one of two ways, picked from a dropdown on the project page:

• Payroll Expenses: wages plus direct costs like taxes and workers’ comp, posted only after payroll runs.
• Hourly Costs: hours times a fixed rate you set per employee, shown as soon as time is entered.

To check, go to All apps > Projects > Projects, open a project and look at the Payroll Expenses / Hourly Costs dropdown. Intuit says: “Changing this setting in one project will affect all projects.” It changes the view and leaves your books as they are.

Some places ignore the dropdown:

• The Time Activity tab always uses hourly costs.
• The Time cost by employee or vendor report always uses hourly costs.
• The Project profitability report “only uses data from payroll expenses,” Intuit says, so it reads light if you track hourly costs.

Pick one method for the whole company and read the reports that use it.

Do the hours have a project on them?

Only hours tagged to a project carry cost to it. An hour with a blank Customer/Project field lands on no job.

Look for these:

• Projects are off. In Account & settings > Advanced, “Organize all job-related activity in one place” must be on.
• Crews clock in without choosing a job. QuickBooks Time requires a customer only when you turn that preference on.
• The project isn’t in QuickBooks Time yet. Create it in QuickBooks first, then import it.
• Salaried staff don’t log hours. Intuit says salaried employees “will also need to track their hours in timesheets.”

To require a job on every QuickBooks Time timesheet:

1. In QuickBooks Time, select the QuickBooks menu icon, then Preferences.
2. Turn on Customers & sub-customers (“A customer selection is required on timesheets”).
3. Turn on Service Items too if you invoice or estimate by service item.

To bring a new project into QuickBooks Time:

1. Create the project in QuickBooks Online under All apps > Projects > Projects.
2. In QuickBooks Time, open the QuickBooks dropdown, choose Import, then select Projects.

To add a project to timesheets already entered:

1. Go to All apps > Time > Time entries.
2. Select the employee, find the timesheet and select Edit.
3. Choose the project in the Customer/Project dropdown and select Save.

For older time in QuickBooks Time, Intuit says “those timesheets have to be edited to add the project to them.”

Is the timing working against you?

Three timing rules catch people out:

• Payroll hasn’t run yet. Payroll expenses post to a project only after the run that pays those hours.
• The hourly rate was set after the work. Intuit says: “Hourly cost rates only apply to time that is tracked after the hourly cost rate is set.”
• The time is locked. In QuickBooks Time, approving hours locks all time up to the report date, and only unapproved timesheets can be edited. Exported time must be unlocked separately, and only up to 90 days back.

Fix tags before the pay run, while every hour is still open.

To set hourly cost rates, go to All apps > Projects > Projects, select Employee hourly rate, and add each employee’s wage, employer taxes and any workers’ comp or overhead. For salaried staff, Intuit divides the annual wage, including employer taxes, by the weeks in a year and then by average weekly hours. The labor burden calculator works out that all-in hourly cost.

What if payroll runs outside QuickBooks?

Nothing posts payroll expenses to your projects for you. Intuit’s steps:

1. Go to All apps > Accounting > Chart of accounts and select New.
2. Set Account Type to Expenses and Detail Type to Payroll Expenses, then Save and Close.
3. Enter the expenses to that account by hand each time you run payroll.

If the project is set to Hourly Costs, hours and rates drive that view, but the Project profitability report still uses payroll expenses only.

How do you check the fix worked?

Rebuild one pay period by hand and compare it with what QuickBooks shows.

1. Run the hours report. Go to Reports > Standard reports and search for Time Activities by Employee Detail. Set the dates to one pay period.
2. Find untagged hours. Each line with a blank customer or project is cost that went to no job.
3. Add up hours by project. Compare each project’s hours with what the foreman expected.
4. Open the project. With the dropdown on your method, check the Overview, or run Project profitability from the Project Reports tab if you use payroll expenses.
5. Tie it to payroll. Hours on projects plus untagged hours should equal the hours paid that run.

Example: a pay period shows 320 crew hours. Jobs A and B carry 250 between them, and 70 have no project. Those 70 hours are the labor missing from your job reports.

If every hour is tagged, the dropdown is right and payroll has run, but some costs still don’t reach their projects, Intuit community threads describe the same thing with no confirmed fix. Send QuickBooks support one paycheck and its timesheets as the example.

For periods your accountant has closed, ask them how to correct labor by job before you change anything.

What are your options?

Option	What you get	What to watch
Do it yourself	The four checks and the pay-period test above	Doing it every pay period, before the run
Buy a tool	A time-tracking or job-costing app that connects to QuickBooks	It still needs a job on every hour
Hire a freelancer	A bookkeeper or QuickBooks ProAdvisor sets up rates, settings and timesheet rules	Whether they also fix past periods
Bring in an outside team (Reports & answers)	Labor rebuilt job by job and checked against payroll	Written notes on how each number is calculated

Once labor lands on jobs, the rest is tagging bills and comparing to budget: see QuickBooks Online job costing for contractors. To see which customers make you money, see gross profit by customer in QuickBooks. If you bill by progress, the over and under billing calculator uses the cost to date this fixes.

FAQ

Why do hours show on my project but no payroll cost? The project may be on Payroll Expenses while payroll hasn’t run for those hours. The pay-period check shows which.

Why does my Project profitability report show no labor? Intuit says it uses payroll expense data only. Hourly costs, or outside payroll never entered to a payroll expense account, leave it light.

Does changing the labor dropdown change my books? No. It changes how every project displays labor, all at once.

Do salaried employees count toward job costs? Only if they log hours on timesheets with a project.

How far back can I fix QuickBooks Time hours? Exported time can be unlocked for editing up to 90 days in the past, according to Intuit.