Since my post over a year ago the QB Team still cannot demonstrate how to get Advanced working like their video. Calling their help desk, no matter what tier of support they transfer you to, will not help either. And unfortunately, you will not find a QB Team Member replying to this thread with a solution, projected timelines for when it will work like the video, etc.
That said, after a year of using Projects for cost objectives/job costing/labor pools, I have discovered many things that work and a few things that do not work. Things that work will always show up on your report "P&L by Customer" and under "Projects" nicely. Things that do not work will always show up under report "P&L by Customer" as a Customer labeled "Not Specified" which is the last column before "Total" to the right.
Things that do not work (again, found under the "Not Specified" Customer left of "Total"):
1. Company Contributions for employees, for instance Retirement or Health Insurance matching, will always show up under "Not Specified." Since payroll/paycheck/direct deposit is an immutable expense in QBO (cannot be edited), you cannot edit and reassign from "Not Specified" to a named Project.
2. Employer Taxes (FUTA, SS, Medi, SUI, etc.) associated with Paid Time Off for employees will always show up in "Not Specified" and cannot be reassigned from "Not Specified" to a named Project.
3. Wages associated with Paid Time Off for employees will always show up in "Not Specified" and cannot be reassigned from "Not Specified" to a named Project.
Things that do work (costed to a Project): everything else assigned to Project, i.e., Payables and Receivables - everything in your COA.
Under Projects, you will find that using "Hourly Cost" is super basic. You will need to assign hourly cost rates to each employee. When you have different rates for different Projects for the same employee, like most consulting firms, then you cannot use the "Hourly Cost" feature at all, because what you pay is not what you bill - and we need to track different bill rates per employee per project/client.
The Hourly Cost view could use a refactor in my opinion since what they are trying to offer in Advanced is the cost of a unit of labor before profit is applied to yield a sale price (e.g., a wrap rate of sorts). If they want to offer a wrap rate, then it would be better to add a wrap rate feature with indirect labor pool support and work breakdown structures.
I have found the Payroll Expenses view is integrated with TSheets/QBO Advances/Intuit Payroll and therefore more realistic and accurate for Job Costing. From my perspective, if the QB Team can fix the three items mentioned above, then we'll have a 100% basic solution for Job Costing when using P&L by Customers as Cost Objectives.
Hope this helps. -A
