A $180 box of fittings from the supply house. A crew member’s Saturday on the Hendricks deck. Both costs belong to one job, and both belong on that customer’s next invoice. In most QuickBooks Online files, neither one gets there unless someone remembers to add it by hand.
Two settings fix this: billable expenses and billable time. Turn both on and every receipt and every hour gets tagged to a job the moment you enter it. QuickBooks carries the cost to the job’s reports and holds the charge for the next invoice. Job costing stops being a month-end project and becomes something the books handle while you work.
Setting One: Billable Expenses
Click the gear icon, then Account and settings, then Expenses. In the Bills and expenses section, turn on “Track expenses and items by customer” and “Make expenses and items billable.” Save.
The same section has a markup field. If you mark up materials, enter your default rate here. A 15% markup turns that $180 box of fittings into a $207 line on the invoice without anyone doing the math.
Billable expenses need QuickBooks Online Plus or Advanced. On Simple Start or Essentials, the option won’t appear.
What Changes on Every Receipt
With the setting on, every expense, check, and bill gets two new columns: Customer and Billable. Pick the job in the Customer column, check Billable, and the cost is recorded against that job. The next time you create an invoice for that customer, QuickBooks lists the waiting charges in a panel on the right side of the screen. Click Add, and the line drops onto the invoice with the description and amount filled in.
A cost tagged to a job without the Billable box checked still counts toward job costing. Use that for materials inside a fixed bid you won’t pass through. Check the box for anything the contract lets you bill separately, like change-order materials or permit fees.
Setting Two: Billable Time
Go back to Account and settings and open the Time tab. Turn on “Allow time to be billable.” Right below it sits “Show billing rate to users entering time.” Leave that one off if you’d rather your crew not see what you charge per hour.
Now each time entry, whether a weekly timesheet or a single activity, carries a customer, a service item, and a Billable box. Your crew logs eight hours to the Hendricks deck, and those hours wait in the same invoice panel as the materials.
Why Both Settings Matter
Materials and labor are the two biggest costs on most jobs. Track one without the other and the job report tells half the story. A deck showing $4,200 in lumber and no labor looks like a winner on paper, right up until payroll clears.
Hours tagged to a job also feed the labor side of the picture. On Plus and Advanced, Projects applies each employee’s cost rate to their logged hours, so the job dashboard shows labor cost next to materials. The Profit and Loss by Job report pulls from the same tags, which means the work you did at entry is the work that builds the report.
Two Habits That Keep This Working
Tag costs the day they happen. A receipt entered the same afternoon gets the right job. A stack of receipts sorted thirty days later gets guesses.
Run the Unbilled Charges and Unbilled Time reports before you send invoices each week. Anything sitting there is money you spent or earned and haven’t asked the customer for yet.
Get the Setup Right Once
Sullivan Bookkeeping Services turns these settings on, sets your markup and service items, and shows your crew how to tag hours so the numbers hold up at month-end. Book a free 15-minute consultation and we’ll walk through your QuickBooks setup together.