Start with the right version. You need QuickBooks Online Plus or Advanced to use the Projects feature. Essentials and Simple Start won’t cut it. The Projects module is what lets you see profitability by job, and without it you’re flying blind on which work actually makes money.

Once you’re on the right plan, set up a project for each job. A project is a container that captures every dollar in and out for that specific work. Time entries, material purchases, subcontractor payments, and customer invoices all get tagged to the project. At any point you can pull a project profitability report and see labor, materials, and margin for that job.

Build out your service items next. Plumbing work isn’t one thing. Emergency repairs, remodel roughs, water heater installs, drain cleaning, and maintenance contracts all have different pricing and different margins. Create separate service items for each work type you bill. When you invoice, pick the right item. This gets you revenue reporting by work type, which tells you where your real money comes from.

Set up your chart of accounts with trade-specific categories. Cost of goods sold should break out materials, subcontractor labor, direct labor, permits, and equipment rentals. General expenses cover trucks, fuel, insurance, licenses, and shop overhead. Resist the urge to lump everything into generic buckets. The extra granularity is what makes the financials useful.

Use classes or locations to track crews, trucks, or service areas. If you run two trucks and want to know which one generates more revenue, classes handle that. If you do both residential and commercial work and want separate P&Ls for each line, that’s also classes. Turn this on in settings before you start entering transactions, because retrofitting class assignments later is painful.

For time tracking, connect a tool like QuickBooks Time (formerly TSheets) so field techs can clock in and assign their hours to a project right from their phone. That labor cost flows directly into job costing. Same with vendor bills for materials. When you enter a bill from your supply house, tag it to the right project so the material cost hits the job.

The reports you’ll actually use are Project Profitability, Profit and Loss by Class, and Sales by Product/Service. Run them monthly to see which jobs, crews, and work types are pulling their weight.

Setup like this isn’t complicated but it’s detailed, and doing it wrong means the reports don’t mean anything. If you’d rather have someone configure it correctly from the start, QuickBooks setup and training is one of the services we handle for trades clients. We also work with plenty of Pasadena bookkeepers referrals who inherited a poorly configured QuickBooks file and need it rebuilt before the numbers make sense.