With Gusto Project Tracking, you can view and create projects to see workforce costs once you've enabled Gusto Time tracking. Employees can track hours spent on projects and tasks, and you can get a report detailing the cost of your team’s time, including wages, benefits, taxes, and more.
Project time tracking is available to our Plus, Premium, or Time & Attendance Plus Simple add-on plans—you can upgrade at any time.
At this time, Gusto Project Tracking is not compatible with contractors or with pay schedules set up by "employee type."
Once your project has been created, employees can track their hours to it. From there, you'll approve or deny their hours, then process payroll as normal.
Deleting a project will also delete past reporting data. At this time, there's not a way to archive a project.
If you need to edit a task name, you'll need to create a new task with the correct name, and then delete the incorrect task name.
Deleting a task from a project will also delete past reporting data.
Not included at this time: Manager approvals, location tracking, contractor project tracking, and overhead or material cost tracking.
A table will generate with the information you selected. If you need to download the table, click the Download button.
For a full detailed report on project tracking, follow the steps in the workforce costing report dropdown below.
Q: Can I customize the project work week to match my pay schedule?
A: At this time, project work weeks will not match your pay schedule and will go based on a 7-day period.
Q: I have non-exempt employees who track time for payroll. How does this work for them?
A: Non-exempt employees still clock in and out as usual. Projects are tracked independently, in a separate tab of the Time tracking section.
Q: Can I see real-time workforce costs for my projects?
A: For now, you're only able to view real-time project hours that have been tracked by your team in their hours section. You can see up-to-date workforce costs for a given project after you've run payroll.
Q: How does this work for employees who track time for payroll, projects, and tasks?
A: Employees who track time for payroll and projects can select which project and task they're working on when clocking in and out.
Q: How does this work for employees who only track time to projects?
A: Employees who track time for projects but not payroll will be able to track project and task time using a separate weekly timesheet in the Time Tracking section of their account. If you add the employee to time tracking for payroll, the weekly timesheet will be replaced by the ability to select a project from a dropdown menu whenever an employee clocks in and out. Project and task hours tracked on the old timesheet will still be reflected in workforce costing reports.
To manually calculate the project costs for a given pay period, follow the steps below—these should match the totals you can find in the workforce costing report.
Here’s the scenario:
Use the steps below to calculate the overall project costs for this employee for a given pay period.
*Note for exempt/Salaried employees: For exempt/salaried employees that work on a project for less than 40 hours in the workweek, you should divide their total project hours in step 4 by 40 hours (instead of dividing by their total overall hours worked).
For each payroll, there are costs associated with a specific job or pay rate, and there are costs only associated with the employee.
Job specific items
The payroll items below are associated with a specific job/pay rate:
Non-job specific items
The payroll items below are not associated with a specific job/pay rate:
For a given payroll line item, our report uses the steps below to calculate the cost of each job.
Multiple employees grouped by jobs
The same calculation is used for each employee per payroll item, then summed up for each payroll where the job titles are the same in order to get the job costing total.
In this example, the employee worked two jobs during the pay period: Doctor 2 and Doctor 4. The employee also earned non-job-specific pay: Commission.
Use the steps from above for the calculation to apply to the payroll report below.
Steps 1 and 2: Add all job-specific payroll line items together to get the overall total, and add all job-specific payroll line items for each unique job to get totals per job.
Step 3: Take the total per job and divide it by the overall total to find the percentage to apply to non-job specific line items:
Step 4: Apply the percentages from Step 3 to each non-job specific line items and attribute the amounts to each job accordingly:
At this time, Gusto Project Tracking is not compatible with pay schedules set up by "employee type".
To run a new report grouped by project, but with different information, start the process again.
If you have an accounting integration with QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks Desktop, or Xero, you can group your payroll information by project with your chart of accounts.
Mapping by projects (instead of job codes or departments) is good for businesses with multiple people in the same role and when some employees work hours in one role and other hours in another role.
Project mapping is not available for Aplos or Freshbooks.
If you use QuickBooks Classes, you can also map your projects to classes in step 9 below. The same expense account can be used for each team and have an assigned QuickBooks Class—this keeps the reports in QuickBooks much cleaner and easier to understand.
If multiple projects share tracking categories, there will not be separate line items when synced to your accounting software. Instead, the project wages will be lumped together.
These transactions will be exported by project to your accounting software account. If any projects are left unmapped, they'll sync based on the original chart of accounts mappings.