How should a general contractor track costs per project?
Every project needs to live as its own entity in your accounting system. In QuickBooks Online, this means creating a project for each job so that every expense, payment, and hour of labor ties directly back to a specific build. Without this structure, your profit and loss statement tells you how the company did overall but nothing about which projects made money and which ones ate into your margins.
Break each project into cost categories at a minimum: labor, materials, subcontractors, equipment, and permits. If you want more detail, add phases like demolition, foundation, framing, mechanical, and finish work. The level of detail should match how you estimate jobs. If your bids break costs into phases, your tracking should too. That way you can compare your estimate to actual spending at a level that’s useful for spotting problems early.
Code every single expense to a job. When you buy materials at the supply house, that receipt gets tagged to the correct project. When a sub sends an invoice, it goes to the right job before you pay it. When your crew works on a project, those hours get allocated there. The moment you let expenses pile up in a general bucket because coding feels like a hassle, your job costing stops being reliable.
Subcontractor costs deserve extra attention because they often make up half or more of a project’s total cost. Don’t just record invoices when you pay them. Track the full contract amount as a committed cost so you can see what’s coming. A project might look on-budget based on what you’ve paid so far, but if you still owe $40,000 in sub invoices that haven’t arrived yet, you’re actually way over.
Run a budget-versus-actual comparison weekly during active projects. Monthly reviews are too late. By the time you see a framing overrun in last month’s report, the crew has already moved on. Weekly reviews let you catch issues while you still have options to adjust.
Change orders should be tracked separately from the original scope. When a client adds a feature or changes materials mid-build, create a new line item with its own budget. Mixing change order costs into the original estimate makes it impossible to tell whether your original bid was accurate or whether the project scope just grew.
The payoff from disciplined job costing is that your future estimates get better over time. You stop guessing and start bidding based on real historical data. You can see which types of projects are your most profitable, which subs consistently come in on budget, and where you tend to underestimate. That information is worth real money.
If you’re not sure how to set this up in QuickBooks or your current system isn’t giving you per-project numbers you trust, a QuickBooks ProAdvisor in Long Beach can help configure your chart of accounts, project structure, and reporting so everything flows correctly from day one. Getting the setup right at the beginning saves hours of cleanup and rework later.
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