Creating a Job Cost Report With Hours Worked – QuickBooks Tip

A QuickBooks tip for creating a job cost report that displays hours worked.

Creating a job cost report displaying the hours worked by employee, on a specific job or on all jobs,  for a specific week or at the end of a job can provide a contractor with vital job costing information so you can see if you correctly bid the number of man hours required on a job.

Luckily, QuickBooks will provide you with this information through the Time by Job Summary or Time by Job Detail Reports, this article will teach you how to modify the reports for your business needs, however, in order for these reports to be useful you must enter employee hours using the QuickBooks Enter Time function.

The Time by Job Summary Report

• From the Reports menu
• Choose Jobs, Time & Mileage
• Time by Job Summary
• From the Dates menu, scroll up to select ALL

This initial report will provide you with summarized information about the total number of hours worked for each QuickBooks Item/Cost Code/or section totaled by job.

While this can provide you with useful information, perhaps you would like to filter the report to include the total time spent on a single, completed job, by cost code.

• Click the Modify Report button at the upper right – above the Dates option
• From the Modify Report: Time by Job Summary window, click on the Filters tab
• From the Choose Filter box, click on Customer:Job
• From the Customer:Job drop down menu (where it currently says All customers/jobs), select Multiple customers/jobs
• From the Select Customer:Job window, scroll through the list of Customers and Jobs until you see the job that you want and click on it to select it.

• Click the OK button, twice
• You now have a time summary report for just this single job.

The Time by Job Detail Report

• From the Reports menu
• Choose Jobs, Time & Mileage
• Time by Job Detail Report

This initial report will provide you with detailed information about the total number of hours worked by each employee under each QuickBooks Item/Cost Code/or section; subtotaled by each cost code and totaled by job.

While this can provide you with useful information, perhaps you would like to filter the report to include the total time spent on a single, completed job, by employee and cost code.

• Click the Modify Report button at the upper right – above the Dates option
• On the Dates tab from the Dates drop down menu, scroll up to select All, you can also add or remove columns to display in the report for Payroll Item, Class, Notes and WC Code.
• Click on the Filters tab
• From the Choose Filter box, click on Customer:Job
• From the Customer:Job drop down menu (where it currently says All customers/jobs), select Multiple customers/jobs
• From the Select Customer:Job window, scroll through the list of Customers and Jobs until you see the job that you want and click on it to select it.

• Click the OK button, twice
• You now have a time by job detail report for just this single job.

These reports will help you to see how accurately you bid your man hours on a job, however, they will NOT include payroll dollars.  You could export the modified time by job detail report to Excel, add a column for Rate (the rate being the hourly wage PLUS the hourly labor burden), add some simple formulas to the spreadsheet and also get the total cost.

NOTE: Always check the Time by Job Detail Report for a No Item Assigned section, hours that appear in this section have been assigned to a job, but not assigned to a QuickBooks item or cost code and this will make your job costing reports inaccurate.

You can correct the job costing reports by pulling the original hard copy timesheets and double click on each entry (which will take you to the time entry field) and you can assign the correct cost code.  You will also need to go to the paycheck detail and add the cost code there as well.

We highly recommend that you run the Time by Job Detail Report each week after entering employee hours, but BEFORE you issue payroll to make sure that everything has been correctly costed to your jobs.

We hope you’ve found this post helpful – if so please leave a comment.