Xero Job Costing – Projects

Explore how jobs, sub customers, and projects function in Xero job costing, showing how a single customer can host multiple long-term projects, with cost allocation, estimates, and invoicing.

Learn to set up cost of goods sold accounts in Xero for job costing, creating direct materials, direct labor, and overhead subaccounts linked to projects and the general ledger.

Add items, or products and services, in the job costing system using double‑sided items to drive invoices, bills, and revenue and cost of goods sold accounts.

Learn to enter beginning balances for jobs and related GL accounts, assign direct materials, direct labor, and overhead to projects, and reconcile effects on balance sheet, P&L, and year-end cutoff.

Enter beginning balances for jobs 15 and 16, including direct materials, direct labor, and overhead, using a spend money workflow with a December 31 cutoff; review impact on balance sheet.

Explore project reports in Xero job costing, including the project detailed report and project summary reports, and learn to filter by status and date for cost tracking.

Enter beginning balances for other accounts in the Xero job costing workflow, using trial balance and balance sheet checks to adjust cash, accounts payable, and retained earnings through journal entries.

Record a purchase of raw materials on account with a bill, increasing inventory and accounts payable. Learn how to allocate materials to jobs or track them in inventory for COGS.

Record direct materials applied to a job in Xero using a journal entry with items, allocating costs to jobs 14–16 while reducing raw materials and increasing cost of goods sold.

Learn how to apply raw materials to jobs by transferring to cost of goods sold and linking to job sheets, with examples for job 15 and 16.

apply direct labor to specified jobs using a spend money form, allocate 218,000 to jobs 14, 15, and 16, and record the cash outflow to cost of goods sold.

Apply overhead to jobs using a percentage allocation for indirect labor, indirect materials, and factory overhead, then assign costs to open jobs and cost of goods sold.

Allocate overhead to jobs using percentage-based methods for indirect materials, utilities, rent, and depreciation, recording with journal entries and spend forms, and assign costs to jobs 14–16.

Complete a job and generate the invoice using actual costs plus a 30 percent markup. Post to accounts receivable and revenue as cost of goods sold is closed.

Learn to add estimated expenses for a job by setting direct materials, labor, and overhead estimates and generating quotes from those estimates.

Categorize project expenses into direct materials, direct labor, and overhead by linking each item to the corresponding estimate, then track actual costs to updated categories.

Group cost of goods sold into direct materials, direct labor, and overhead in a custom income statement using the edit layout, then save as a custom report.

See how to track a job cost in Excel, post journal entries to work in process, apply direct materials, direct labor, and overhead, and reconcile with QuickBooks.

Explore an Excel problem tracking cost of goods sold by directly posting to COGS, compare with QuickBooks, and reconcile job cost sheets, materials, labor, overhead, and timing differences.