QuickBooks Payroll for Construction: Job Costing and Projects

About this video

David, partnering with Intuit, sets up QuickBooks Online payroll for construction with job costing and project profitability. Two prerequisites are stated: Payroll Premium, which bundles mobile time tracking, and QuickBooks Plus, which provides project tracking. He creates a project named by address plus project for the Kevin Cookie Company, invoices the project itself so income tracks to the job, and in Bank Transactions enables the Customer column for job costing — expenses select the project in Customer while the From/To column holds the actual vendor, and the Billable checkbox is for time-and-materials work. Employees are added with self-onboarding through the QuickBooks Workforce app and time tracking checked; he sets a weekly pay schedule, adds additional pay types such as demolition at $20 an hour and carpentry, and notes workers’ comp is tracked, not paid, by QuickBooks with a limit of one code per employee. Contractors are invited to submit a W-9 electronically for 1099 tracking, and their bills are assigned to a customer/project. Service items matching the pay types are created, then mapped to pay types in Classic QuickBooks Time via the Payroll Item Mapping Tool using overrides by service item. Employees log time in Workforce by project and service item; approved time flows into payroll, splitting pay across work types and jobs rather than paying a single total. He closes with Project Profitability, Time Cost by Employee or Vendor, and Unbilled Time and Expenses reports, and warns QuickBooks is not built for certified payroll, union shops, or multi-state operations.

Key takeaways

• Construction job costing in this setup requires both Payroll Premium for bundled mobile time tracking and QuickBooks Plus for project tracking.
• Every hour, bill, and invoice must be assigned to a project or the labor and costs have nowhere to go and will not appear in profitability reports.
• Different pay rates require both additional pay types on the employee and matching service items, linked through the Payroll Item Mapping Tool with overrides by service item.
• QuickBooks tracks workers’ comp but does not pay the premiums, and it can track only one workers’ comp code per employee.
• The creator cautions that QuickBooks handles private residential and commercial work well but is not built for certified payroll, union shops, or multi-state operations.

Episode details: published May 1, 2026 · 16:36 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are Kevin Stratvert’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.

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