While it is true that a QBO Project is used for job costing, it is highly constrain by enforcing a mapping requirement to a single customer. I have a similar challenges in a different field of endeavor, but the semantics are similar. Namely, I need to track the profitability of events, where an event typically services many people. Obviously, with QBO's severe limitation, I am unable to associate an event (QBO Project) with its multiple attendees. It would be highly useful to disassociate an event with a 'customer' in order to collect and aggregate all the income & expenses associated with an event. The single-customer mapping forces a Project "view" to be customer-centric, which is fine if your building a kitchen for a client but not if your business involves tracking the profitability across a Project that is actually project-based and not customer-based.

I've been grinding my teeth, looking for a workaround, but none appears to exist in QBO, which I find highly disturbing, since this need is very commonplace. After reading some articles and receiving some feedback from other QBO users in this forum and others, I considered hacking my requirement using QBO Classes. Clearly Class semantics are designed to connote facets of one's business that enable meaningful income/expense breakdowns. A QBO Class reflects "types" and not "instances", which is why I considered my approach a hack. My intent was to create a type-specific QBO Class and then sub-class it with "instances" of that type. For example, suppose I was a car dealership and was interested in tracking income/expenses based upon the types of vehicles I sold (e.g., truck, car, car > SUV, car > compact, car > convertible, etc.). Now, I want to track my sales/costs for specific car models, so I create yet another subclass. Examples:

car > SUV > Mazda CX-30, car > SUV > Chevrolet Equinox, car > SUV > Nissan Rogue

In this context, without getting into a deep-dive on Ontology and terminological semantics, the Mazda, Chevrolet and Nissan SUV models can be considered "instances" of the SUV "type". Clearly, this is not the intended use for QBO Class. However, barring another workaround, this is the only option I could find to me my needs. I was about to implement this approach until I discovered the QBO Plus version allows a maximum of forty Classes. Bummer. In the car dealership scenario, I bet one can dig up at least forty SUV "instances", let alone "instances" of the other vehicle types. Another dead end.

I have to say I am truly disappointed at this egregious oversight on Intuit's part.