Intuit has introduced a new feature, QuickBooks Online Projects. This is a lightweight project management feature that is aimed at simpler businesses. The feature was released this week in the US, and last week in Canada and Australia. If you are running a project-oriented business using QuickBooks Online you may find this useful, but it isn’t as full-featured as some addons, like BillQuick. This is Intuit’s first step in this direction — they will be looking for customer feedback as to what features are needed moving forward.
Installing QuickBooks Online Projects
This feature is disabled by default. To enable it in QuickBooks Online, click your gear icon at the upper right corner and select Account and Settings.
If you are working with QuickBooks Online Accountant, you can enable this for your firm account by clicking the gear icon and selecting Company Settings.
Within your settings, select Advanced settings and scroll down, you will find a new section for Projects. Check the box and click Save. Note that you cannot turn this feature off once you have enabled it.
Once you have enabled this feature you will see a new option in the left navigation menu, Projects.
Working with Projects
You can add a new project by clicking the New project button at the upper right of the Projects list. Each project needs a project name and an assigned customer. The note field is optional.
Once you have created a project you will see it in the project list. Each project has a status, which can be in progress, completed or canceled. You can change the status by using the Options dropdown at the right of the list, or when you view the project.
If you select a project from this list you can edit the project, view project-oriented reports, see a list of transactions that apply to this project, and add new transactions to the project.
Projects are supported in invoices, payment receipts, expenses, estimates, time transactions, bills, and purchase orders. These transactions can be created by either the Add to project button when you are looking at the project, or you can select the project from within a new transaction that you create in the normal way from the Create menu.
For purchase-related transactions you will pick the project from the detail line.
Looking at the project, the Transactions tab shows most, but not all of the transactions for this project. Purchase Orders don’t show here, for example. I hope that this view is expanded to show options for all transactions, and to add filters for transaction type.
Project Reports
In the Overview tab you have several project-oriented reports: Project Profitability, Unbilled Time and Expenses, and Nonbillable Time. These reports don’t exist in the Report center, just in the detailed view of the Project.
Here’s the Project Profitability report.
Here’s the Unbilled Time and Expenses report:
And here’s the Nonbillable Time report:
These are fairly basic reports, and I hope that Intuit will be expanding the options found here.
Sub-Customers and Projects
Projects are similar to sub-customers, and in fact are built upon that same feature. If you look at the Customer list, you will see both sub-customers and projects. In the screen shot below, Dunning Branch Office is a project, the others are sub-customers.
The good points here are that this lets you see all the projects and sub-customers in one list, and it allows you to create new transactions (from the dropdown on the right) easily for both types using the same mechanism. I wish it was easier to tell which was a sub-customer and which was a project in this list.
You also see both sub-customers and projects when you select the customer when adding a transaction like an invoice. In this case it is easy to tell which type it is.
Note that you cannot convert a sub-customer to a project, so if you have existing sub-customers prior to enabling this feature you cannot change them over to projects to take advantage of the new features.
Issues, I Always Have Issues
Intuit’s typical approach to what might be a significant new feature is to release it early, before it is (in my opinion) fully developed. This lets them get new features out quickly so that they can get early feedback from customers. However, that often means that the feature may be lacking what may be important features for some kinds of businesses. They aren’t (yet) trying to make this the ultimate project management program. They leave that kind of complexity up to add-on developers like BillQuick.
I will note that this feature was initially available in QuickBooks Labs, so people have been able to try it out for several months now.
Note that this is not the same as the Work feature in QuickBooks Online Accountant that I talked about earlier this year. Yes, in that feature you create Projects, but these are different Projects than you find in the Project feature. It’s not too confusing as long as you keep in mind that Work projects are in QuickBooks Online Accountant, and Project projects are in QuickBooks Online (which you can access via QuickBooks Online Accountant). At least, I think I have that right? Terminology conflicts like this can be so confusing….
Here are a few issues that I have with the current release:
- It is important that you are sure that you want to use this feature because you cannot turn it off. It is a permanent switch. However, I’m not sure that I see any drawback to having this on. If you don’t like it, just don’t use it.
- As mentioned above, you cannot change an existing sub-customer to a project. This is a bit inconvenient for project-oriented businesses that already have been using sub-customers prior to implementing this feature. Converting them would be complicated, I’m sure, but it would have been nice for some users.
- This feature is not integrated with any Intuit payroll system at this time. I expect that integration to come at some future point.
- The Transactions tab of the project view doesn’t show all transactions for the project. Purchase orders don’t show, for example. I would like an option to see all transactions here, with filters by type.
- If you set a project to Completed or Cancelled status you can still post transactions to that project. I’m not happy with this, as there is no warning when you do this. I can see still being able to post transactions to a completed project, but it is harder to argue for posting to a cancelled project. I really would like to see a way to mark a project as final, so that no more transactions can be posted.
- I wish it was easier to tell which was a sub-customer and which was a project in the Project list.
Conclusion
All in all, this is a very light implementation of project management, aimed at the simplest of businesses. I did predict that Intuit would be expanding the product to provide better support for project oriented businesses in my article on Intuit’s focus on QuickBooks Online. I believe that this is a first step towards a more comprehensive project management feature.
Will you find this useful as is, or will you wait until there are more features? And what features do you think are essential, that Intuit needs to add?
