How to Track Project Profitability Using QuickBooks Time Entries

The gap between budget and reality

Most professional services teams set project budgets. Fewer have a live view of where they stand against those budgets on any given Tuesday. The result is the same conversation, over and over: the project finishes, the invoice goes out, and someone notices that the hours billed don't match the scope.

QuickBooks Online records time entries for every project. But QBO's built-in reporting makes it hard to answer a simple question: how many hours have we used on this project, and how does that compare to what we estimated? The data is there — it just takes too many clicks to surface it.

How QuickBooks stores project time

In QBO, time entries are associated with a customer or sub-customer. When your team logs hours, each entry carries a date, an employee, a customer, a service item, and an hours figure. This is useful data — but QBO's reporting groups it by date or by customer without easy budget comparison.

That's the problem Time On It solves with Project Insights. Once you sync your QBO time data, every customer with logged hours appears on the Project Insights page with:

• Total hours logged
• Billable hours separately
• A budget progress bar if a budget has been set
• An over-budget flag when hours exceed the budget

Setting up budget tracking

Before the budget bar appears, you need to set a budget for the project in Time On It's project settings. This is a simple hours figure — say, 80 hours for a website redesign. Once set, every sync from QBO fills the bar based on the actual hours logged for that customer in the selected date range.

The bar turns red automatically when hours exceed the budget. You don't need to remember to check — the visual makes the over-run visible the moment you open the page.

Monthly retainer periods

For retainer clients, a single budget figure is often not enough. A client on a 20-hour-per-month retainer needs to be tracked month by month — not just in aggregate.

Time On It handles this with retainer periods. If you set a start date, end date, and monthly budget for a project, the app automatically breaks the engagement into monthly periods. Each period shows hours used versus the monthly budget, and whether it's a past period (closed), the current period (active), or a future one. This gives you a clear month-by-month picture of retainer utilisation without any manual calculation.

Drilling into the detail

The project-level view shows totals. But sometimes you need to understand what made up those hours — which employees worked on the project, on which customers, and what they were doing.

Clicking a project in Project Insights opens its detail view. From there, clicking any customer row shows the individual time entries behind that total: date, employee, service item, description, and hours for every entry. This is the level of detail that answers "why did this project go over?" without having to dig through QBO manually.

Connecting the time and revenue sides

Time On It shows the time side of project profitability — hours budgeted versus hours used. The revenue side — what you invoiced and what it cost — lives in QBO. Together, they give you what you need for a complete picture: if you know your hourly rate and your total hours, you can calculate whether the project delivered the margin you expected.

For teams doing monthly reviews, the workflow becomes straightforward: sync the previous month's time data from QBO, open Project Insights, and review which projects are on track and which ran over. The conversation about scope, pricing, or team allocation can happen with actual numbers rather than estimates.