QuickBooks Desktop for Mac: Items That Track Both Cost and Revenue

QuickBooks Desktop for Mac. Among the setup questions that keep surfacing in the Desktop for Mac community, one of the most persistent is how to configure items so that money paid out and money billed for the same work both attach to the right accounts and the right customer job. Users who miss a step here usually discover the gap later, when a job profitability report shows revenue with no matching costs, or when reimbursable charges never surface at invoicing time. We looked at the accepted answer to this recurring question, and it traces the problem to a single checkbox most users never notice.

The symptom: one-sided items

An item created with only an income account invoices fine, but nothing spent against it ever reaches the job. Costs entered on the expense side, meanwhile, never appear when it is time to bill. The result is job reporting that understates what a job truly cost, plus unbilled work that slips through entirely. The accepted solution is to make the item two-sided before any transactions are entered against it.

The accepted answer: make the item two-sided

From the Lists menu, open Items. Editing an existing item means double-clicking it to bring up the edit window; creating a new one means selecting the plus icon and choosing New Item. The pivotal step is a checkbox marking the item as both purchased and sold. Its wording depends on the item type:

• For a Service item, the option identifies the service as subcontracted work.
• For a Non-inventory Part, it identifies the item as bought for and sold to a specific customer job.
• For an Other Charge, it flags the charge as reimbursable.

Once that box is selected, the item exposes both an expense account and an income account, and the answer directs users to assign both so the same item carries the cost and the sale. A rate or amount can be stored on the item itself. A default markup percentage can be set under Settings in the Sales and Invoicing section, which lets the program calculate a sales price from the cost; a different price can be typed per item. Where costs vary from purchase to purchase, the guidance is to leave one or both prices at zero and enter real figures at transaction time. A preferred vendor is optional.

Getting the cost onto the job

Two entry paths are covered. When writing a check from the Banking menu, the user switches to the Items tab, selects the service item for the subcontracted work, verifies the cost the program prefilled, enters a quantity, and assigns the customer job before saving. Entering a bill from the Vendors menu follows the same logic: check the prefilled cost, correct it if needed, and put the job name in the Customer:Job column so the charge lands on that job.

Owner and partner time

The answer also handles work performed by an owner or partner rather than an outside subcontractor. The person is set up through the Other Names list, and a service item is created for their work with the same subcontracted-work option selected, except the expense account is the individual’s equity account rather than a business expense. To bill that time, it goes on a weekly timesheet or a single activity record against the service item and the customer job, marked billable, then flows onto an invoice through the Time/Costs button and its Time tab.

The zero-amount check, with a caveat

For owner time that should appear in job costs without affecting the profit and loss statement, the accepted answer describes writing a check for zero. It can be drawn on the regular checking account or on a dedicated checking account set up solely to hold such checks. Be clear about what this is: a reporting convention, not a payment. The item and job assignment do the reporting work while the zero amount keeps the ledger unaffected, and a dollar figure only posts if an actual rate is entered, which would flow to equity. Job cost figures produced this way represent notional value rather than cash spent, so the technique deserves deliberate adoption rather than reflexive use.

Where inventory items differ

The two-sided treatment above applies to service, non-inventory, and other charge items. Inventory parts are a separate case: they already carry both a cost and a sales price, post to cost of goods sold and an income account, and track quantity on hand, so they need none of these checkboxes. Users mixing inventory and non-inventory items across jobs should keep that distinction in mind, since the reporting behavior differs between them.

The broader takeaway from the thread is that item setup decides job reporting before the first transaction is ever recorded, and a few minutes on the item list saves the job reports later.