WIP report in QuickBooks Online: what QBO has and what it lacks

If you keep the books for a contractor on QuickBooks Online, sooner or later the bank or the surety asks for a WIP report, and you go looking for it in the Reports menu. It is not there. This guide explains what QuickBooks Online does and does not give you, which report to export for a work-in-progress schedule, and the setup choices that make that export clean every month.

QuickBooks Online has no WIP report

A QuickBooks Team reply in the QuickBooks Community put it plainly in January 2024: "In QuickBooks Online, Work in Progress (WIP) is not available." The suggestions in that thread were to post costs to a WIP asset account or to use Projects, which are bookkeeping approaches rather than a schedule.

That matters because a construction WIP schedule is not a balance in one account. It is a table with one row per open job that combines numbers QuickBooks has (cost to date and billed to date) with numbers it does not (the contract amount with change orders, and the project manager's estimate of cost to complete). From those it calculates percent complete, earned revenue and over or under billing. The WIP schedule guide walks through each column.

So the practical question is not how to make QuickBooks produce the report, but how to get the two numbers it does hold out of it, by job, reliably.

What QuickBooks Online can give you

For each job, the WIP schedule needs:

• Billed to date: income on the job from its start through the period end.
• Cost to date: cost of goods sold and expenses on the job over the same dates.

Both come from one report, as long as income and costs are tagged to the job when they are entered.

Profit and Loss by Customer. If you track jobs as customers or as projects (QuickBooks treats projects as sub-customers in reports), this report has one column per job. Total Income in each column is billed to date, and Total Cost of Goods Sold plus Total Expenses is cost to date.

Profit and Loss by Class. If you track jobs as classes, the same report summarized by class gives one column per job, with the same rows.

Class tracking and Projects are not on every QuickBooks Online plan. Check which your company's plan includes before you choose how to track jobs.

Exporting it for a WIP schedule

Run the report this way each month:

1. Open Reports and run Profit and Loss by Customer (or Profit and Loss by Class).
2. Set the dates from the start of your oldest open job through the period end, not just the month or the year. The WIP schedule needs totals to date for each job.
3. Set Accounting method to Accrual, so billed means invoiced and cost includes unpaid bills.
4. Click Export to Excel, and keep the file as it came out.
5. Save the customized report so next month you only change the end date.

Then check the export before you use it:

• Every open job has its own column.
• No job's costs sit in a "Not specified" column. If they do, find the untagged bills or payroll and tag them.
• The date range starts before your oldest open job did. A job missing from the export usually means the range starts too late.
• Retainage you billed is in income. If retainage or deposits are booked to the balance sheet instead, billed to date from this report will be short, and you will need to adjust it.

Setting up QuickBooks so the export works

The report is only as good as the tagging behind it. A few habits decide whether the monthly export is usable:

• Pick one way to track jobs and stick with it. Customers, projects or classes all work, but mixing them, such as some jobs as projects and others as classes, splits the numbers across two reports.
• Tag every cost line to a job. That includes payroll, which is often missed when hours are not assigned to a customer or project.
• Keep overhead off jobs. Shop rent or office salaries tagged to a job inflate its cost to date and make it look further along than it is.
• Name jobs consistently. A job number in front of each name, like "2207 Clinic fit-out", sorts cleanly and survives a rename.
• Bill retainage the same way every time. If the full amount is invoiced and retainage is tracked as receivable, billed to date stays right.

What still lives outside QuickBooks

Even with clean books, three inputs for the WIP schedule come from somewhere else:

• Contract amounts and approved change orders. QuickBooks does not hold a contract value per job in a form these reports show.
• Retainage percentages, from each contract.
• Cost to complete, from each project manager, every period. See cost to complete for collecting it.

This is why most bookkeepers export to Excel and rebuild the WIP schedule by hand. A WIP schedule template with the formulas in place helps; the export, the pasting and the chasing are still monthly work.

Desktop and other options

QuickBooks Desktop's contractor editions include job reports that Online does not, and some construction accounting systems produce WIP schedules on their own. If your client is staying on QuickBooks Online, the realistic choices are a spreadsheet built from the export, or a tool that reads the export or the data for you. Ask your client's surety or bank which format they accept before you choose.

How WIP Monthly works with QuickBooks Online

WIP Monthly reads the same export. You upload Profit and Loss by Customer (or by Class) as an Excel or CSV file, and it reads billed to date and cost to date for every job column. There is no QuickBooks connection to set up. It notes a cash-basis export or a date range that does not end on the period end, and refuses a plain Profit and Loss with no job columns, naming the settings to re-export with. You enter each job's contract and retainage once and they carry forward; project managers enter cost to complete through an emailed link. When you finalize the month it makes a PDF and an Excel file of the schedule.