Xero Projects for Trade Businesses: What It Does, Costs, and Stops

A project in Xero is a container you attach costs and revenue to so you can see whether that particular piece of work made money. You create the project against a customer, log time to it with a start/stop timer, attach expenses and bills, then raise an invoice from the tracked time and costs. Xero describes it as project tracker and job costing software and positions it directly at construction and trade businesses (xero.com).

The important framing, and the one most reviews skip: Xero Projects is an accounting-side tracker. It answers "what did this job cost and what did we bill for it." It does not answer "who is going where on Thursday and did they collect a signature." Everything in this post follows from that distinction.

No, Xero Projects is not free, and there is no single monthly figure I can honestly quote you.

Projects is packaged as part of Xero's plan structure rather than as a flat standalone add-on. Higher plan tiers include Projects with a set number of Projects users, and once you go past that included count you pay per additional Projects user. So the real cost depends on your plan tier and how many people you want logging time. Two techs and a bookkeeper is a different bill to eight techs.

Here is why you should not trust the numbers you find in blog posts, including numbers older than about a year. Across the partner-accountant pages currently ranking for this term, one lists tiered pricing at $15/$25/$35 a month, another lists $10 for the first user plus $7 for each extra, and a third says Projects is simply included at no extra cost on higher plans. Those cannot all be right at once. They are snapshots from different packaging eras.

Prices also move. Xero lifted Australian plan prices on 1 July 2026, with Ignite going from $35 to $37, Grow from $75 to $78 and Comprehensive from $100 to $107, and the multi-organisation discount was removed on the same date (reported plan changes). Go to Xero's current AU pricing page, pick your plan, count your Projects users, and do the sum yourself. That is the only figure that will be true on the day you sign up.

Credit where it is due. For a certain shape of job, Projects is tidy and it lives inside the ledger you already reconcile in.

• Time tracking with a start/stop timer, plus location-based tracking, from the mobile app (Xero app listing)
• Expense capture against a project, including staff expenses and bills
• Quoting and estimating costs on the project before work starts
• Invoicing built from tracked time, expenses or a fixed amount, with markup
• Profitability view showing estimated versus actual on each job
• No sync gap, because the data was already in Xero

If you run time-and-materials work that gets quoted once, done in a visit or two, and invoiced in full at completion, this is a reasonable setup and you may not need anything else. I have told owners exactly that.

Four workflows come up again and again, and Projects handles none of them cleanly. Owners on r/xero have been blunt about it, with threads calling the module "very basic" and "genuinely tough for construction workflows," and posts asking for a replacement for Projects rather than tweaks to it.

1. Staged billing and progress claims

A fitout, a new-build rough-in, a multi-week commercial job: you bill in stages against work completed, not in one lump at the end. Projects invoices from tracked time and expenses. It has no native concept of a claim schedule, a percentage of completion, retention held, or a variation approved mid-job and rolled into the next claim. Owners describing this on r/xero end up building the claim in a spreadsheet and typing the invoice manually, which puts the job's true position outside the ledger.

2. Materials, from purchase order to supplier bill to job cost

This is the one that quietly wrecks margin reporting. You raise a purchase order to the wholesaler, the delivery is split, and the supplier invoices you for part of it. Owners on r/xero ask directly whether a Xero purchase order can sit in a partially billed state and find that it cannot, so the reconciliation falls back to manual tracking outside the ledger. Reviewers on the Xero App Store also report that purchase orders do not link to projects, which means materials cost lands on the job late, or by hand, or not at all.

3. Subcontractors

Projects was designed around your own staff logging their own hours. A subbie is a cost you commit to, receive against, retain from, and sometimes back-charge. There is no commitment tracking, so the job looks profitable right up until the subbie's invoice arrives. If you also operate in the UK, the Domestic Reverse Charge rules on subcontractor VAT add a treatment layer on top that a simple time-tracker was never built to carry.

4. Phases

Owners want cost by job, and by phase within the job, and often by branch or crew as well. Projects gives you tasks inside a project, but tasks are labour buckets, not cost centres you can report a margin against alongside another dimension. That pushes people to tracking categories, which is where the next ceiling sits.

The standard job-costing workaround in Xero is tracking categories. You create a category called Job, add each job as an option, and code every invoice and bill line to it. Your P&L will then break out by job.

The ceiling is hard and it arrives fast. Xero allows two active tracking categories per organisation (four in total counting archived ones), with up to 100 options each. So you can have Job and Branch, or Job and Phase, but not all three. Owners hitting this on r/xero also report that reports will not break out cleanly by both categories together, leaving manual reclassification as the only route to a job-level margin.

A rough guide from the conversations I have: a three-tech shop running single-site jobs can live on tracking categories alone and skip Projects entirely. A fifteen-tech contractor running multiple crews across phased jobs will hit the two-category wall inside a quarter, and no amount of clever category naming gets around it.

For years the answer to "Xero Projects is too light" was "use WorkflowMax." That answer is no longer safe to give. Since WorkflowMAX moved to BlueRock, threads from displaced users describe the transition roughly, with teams actively shopping for something that does billing and project management together. Users in those threads name NextMinute and Abtrac among the places they landed.

My read: WorkflowMax still suits a business that bills time against jobs and wants deeper job admin than Projects offers. It does not suit cost-heavy trade work with subcontractors and materials commitments, and the switching decision in that community is still unsettled. Do not plan a five-year stack around it without testing it against your actual claim and materials workflow first.

I will not pretend every trade business needs a separate system. Projects is the right call when most of these are true:

• Jobs are quoted once, completed in one or two visits, and invoiced in full
• Labour is the dominant cost and it is your own staff, not subbies
• Materials are bought as you go and coded to the job on the bill
• You have fewer than a handful of people logging time
• Scheduling is a whiteboard or a shared calendar and that genuinely works

If that is your shop, adding Projects to the plan you already pay for is cheaper and simpler than running two systems. In fourteen years of these conversations, the mistake I see more often than under-buying is over-buying: an owner with six one-visit jobs a day buying a construction cost engine and abandoning it by month three.

In Australian trade threads the pattern is consistent: Xero is the assumed ledger, and owners bolt a job app on top rather than trying to run jobs from the ledger alone. Electricians and sole-trader subbies describe hearing about nothing but Xero in their industry, then adding something else to actually run the work. That is not a criticism of Xero. Xero reported roughly 2.8 million subscribers across Australia and New Zealand at 31 March 2026 in its FY26 results, and it earned that position as an accounting platform.

| Category | What it replaces | What it adds | Xero relationship | |---|---|---|---| | Xero Projects | Spreadsheet job tracking | Time, expenses, per-job P&L | Native | | Field service management (Field Promax, ServiceM8, Tradify, Fergus) | Whiteboard, paper dockets, manual invoicing | Dispatch, mobile workflows, price books, recurring maintenance, customer sign-off | Integration | | Construction cost tools (Planyard, LiveCosts, Gojee) | Excel cost reports | Commitments, variations, subcontractor cost control | Integration |

The part that decides whether the second system helps or hurts is the depth of the sync. A shallow integration that dumps a CSV once a night creates two versions of the truth. The Xero API allows 60 calls per minute per tenant plus a daily per-tenant cap, and it is the daily cap that bites at month-end when invoices, contacts and payments all move at once. An integration that syncs incrementally and pushes only what changed behaves very differently from one that re-sends the world every night.

On our side, the piece that answers the staged-billing gap directly is partial billing by approved work-complete visit: a completed work order becomes a draft accounts-receivable invoice in Xero with each product line matched to its Xero item, and you can bill the portion that is signed off rather than waiting for the whole job. If you want the invoicing mechanics in detail, we covered them in Xero invoicing software for field service businesses, and the scheduling side sits in our guide to appointment scheduling and invoicing software.

Customer reviews of Field Promax tend to land on the same two points rather than on feature counts: one enterprise rolled us out across four of its businesses with plans for more, citing customer service beyond expectations and customisations that out-of-box and niche products could not match, and another reviewer noted the app met their needs and that I personally accommodated business-specific changes they asked for. That second one is deliberate on my part. Trade workflows differ enough that the last ten percent of fit usually has to be built, not configured.