Hi ali.kippan,
Thanks for sharing your thoughts about the Projects feature in QuickBooks Online. I know there are many ways that various businesses and charities handle projects outside of the program, and having a feature that meets those needs is key.
If you haven't already taken a moment to do so, I recommend submitting feedback to our product development team about what you'd like to see in the feature, such as assigning more than one customer to a project and other ideas like that. It's great that you've found a workaround for your reporting, but I can see how having a built-in report to see what you're looking for would be much simpler. Here are the steps for how to do that: How do I submit feedback?
As for having projects that span over a few years, the Projects feature gives you the opportunity to control the timeline for the project. You can enter transactions and run reports for the project as long as you need to, and when it's fully complete, you can change the status of the project for your records. The project status is found right under the project name when you open it up and are on the page that shows the Overview, Transactions, Time Activity, and Project Reports tabs. To change the status, all it takes is clicking the down arrow and making the selection.
Here are some articles about Projects for your reference so you can see what's currently available with the feature.
You mention needing to constantly adjust dates, which I'd like to learn more about to see if there's a solution for you. Feel free to reply with more information about what dates you mean and where you're seeing them. That way, We can make sure we're on the same page. If you mean to say you're constantly having to adjust report customizations, I recommend considering the memorize reports option, which saves your customizations for future use. Learn more about that here: Memorize reports in QuickBooks Online
I hope that helps, but don't hesitate to comment again if you have further questions. I've got your back.
