Your P&L says you made $16,000 this year on three remodels. The number is real, but it hides something important. The kitchen remodel made $12,000. The bathroom remodel made $6,000. The deck build lost $2,000. Add them together and the year looks solid. Look at them one at a time and a different story shows up: one of those three jobs should never have been bid the way it was bid, and the only way to know it is to look.
Most contractors never look. They check the bank balance, they check the P&L at tax time, and they call it good. A bottom-line number will not tell you which job made the year and which job quietly ate the profit from the other two. For this, you need the Profit and Loss by Job report, and you need to know how to make it work.
Two Ways to Track Profit by Job in QuickBooks Online
QuickBooks Online gives you two paths to job-level profit, and which one applies depends on your subscription.
On Simple Start or Essentials, you set up sub-customers. Each job gets created as a sub-customer nested under the main customer, so “Kitchen Remodel” sits under “Johnson, Mark” instead of standing on its own. Every invoice, expense, and bill tagged to the sub-customer rolls up into its own line on your reports. The method works and costs nothing extra, though reading job performance means digging through a Profit and Loss by Customer report and matching sub-customer names by hand.
On Plus or Advanced, you get Projects. A project groups every transaction, every tagged expense, and every tracked hour under one job and gives you a profitability dashboard without manual matching. Existing sub-customers convert into projects directly from the Projects tab, so switching later does not mean starting over. For a contractor bidding jobs regularly who wants margin at a glance instead of assembling it by hand, Projects earns its keep fast.
Either way, the report worth running is the Profit and Loss by Job, or inside Projects, the Project Reports Profitability view. It takes the same P&L already familiar to you and splits it by job instead of showing one blended total.
The Report Only Works If You Tag Everything
Here is where most contractors lose the value of this report before they run it once. A Profit and Loss by Job report holds only as much accuracy as the tagging behind it. Buy lumber for the deck and forget to assign it to the deck job, and the cost falls into a general bucket, making the deck’s numbers look better than reality. Bill a supply run to the kitchen job but never mark the invoice billable, and you eat the cost instead of passing it through.
Two settings turn this into a habit instead of a chore. Turn on billable expenses under Account and Settings, under Expenses, so anything bought for a job gets checked as billable and tied to the customer right at entry. Turn on time tracking the same way, so hours worked get tagged to a job as they are logged instead of guessed at later. Once both are on, tagging a job takes two seconds at the point of purchase or at the end of the day, not a research project at tax time.
Check It Monthly, Not Once a Year
A report run only in December tells you what already happened. A report run monthly tells you what to do next. If the deck job trends negative by week three, a monthly check catches it while time remains to adjust the scope, have a pricing conversation with the client, or learn something for the next bid. Wait until the job closes out, and all there is to see is a postmortem.
The habit matters more than which day gets picked for it. Set a recurring reminder, run the Profit and Loss by Job report, and read down the list. Perfection on every job is not the goal here. Watch for the one job drifting off course, before it drags the good ones down with it.
This is also where the books start to feel like a second job stacked on top of the real one. Reading the report is the easy part, once someone keeps the tagging clean and the categories consistent all year. Keeping it clean is where a quickbooks bookkeeper earns a fee, making sure every expense lands on the right job the first time so the report stays trustworthy the moment it opens.
The business already made $16,000 this year, and the real question is which jobs deserve a bid again, and which ones deserve a pass next time someone calls. The Profit and Loss by Job report holds the answer inside QuickBooks Online right now. Tagging the work correctly and opening the report on a schedule, instead of once a year by accident, is all it takes.