Class and Location Tracking for Card Spend in QuickBooks Online

QuickBooks Online has no "dimensions" in the Sage Intacct sense. It has two tracking fields, class and location, plus the customer/project field on each expense line. For most small and mid-sized companies those are enough to answer the questions the owner asks: what did the Denver office spend, what did the Wilson job cost, how much went to marketing.

Card spend is where that reporting tends to fall apart. A feed brings in hundreds of charges a month with no class and no location, and someone has to add them. This guide covers how the two fields behave, the setup choices that matter for card spend, and a coding approach that keeps your class and location reports trustworthy.

First, check your plan

Class and location tracking aren't on every QuickBooks Online plan. Intuit's class tracking article lists them for QuickBooks Online Plus and Advanced, and its location tracking article says the same: "only available for QuickBooks Online Plus and QuickBooks Online Advanced." Simple Start and Essentials don't have them.

There's also a cap. Intuit's usage limits page gives Plus "40 combined classes and locations" and Advanced unlimited. Only active classes and locations count, so you can make old ones inactive to free up room. Forty sounds like a lot until you try to make every job a class. That's a sign you want the customer/project field for jobs, not class.

Class vs. location: the difference that matters for cards

Both fields live under Settings → Account and settings → Advanced → Categories. They look alike in that menu, but they behave differently on a transaction.

Class can go on each line. When you turn on class tracking you choose how classes are assigned: "One to entire transaction" or "One to each row in transaction." With per-row classes, one card charge can be split across classes. A $600 software renewal can be $400 Sales and $200 Operations.

Location is one per transaction. A credit card expense has a single location, set in the header. You can't split one charge between two offices by location. Ramp's own QuickBooks Online help article documents the same constraint from the integration side: amounts can be split across categories and classes, but not across location or vendor.

That difference should decide which field carries which meaning:

• Use location for something a whole charge belongs to. An office, a store, a property, a region. A hotel bill or a fuel stop happens in one place. QuickBooks lets you relabel the field (Division, Property, Territory and so on), so call it what your business calls it.
• Use class for something a charge can be shared across. Departments, service lines, cost centers. These are the things one invoice sometimes covers more than one of.
• Use customer/project for jobs. Job costing reports run off it, it isn't part of the 40-item cap, and it sits on the line, so a mixed charge can go to two jobs.

If you set up the two fields the other way around (department as location, office as class), one shared SaaS charge will eventually need two departments, and location can't do that.

Setup choices for card spend

Pick per-row class assignment if you'll ever split. Changing it later is allowed, but your history will be a mix of styles. If any card charges are shared across departments, use "One to each row in transaction" from the start.

Keep the class list short and stable. Classes that come and go make year-over-year reports hard to read. If a value only lasts a quarter, it's probably a project, not a class.

Decide your fallback. Some charges really are company-wide: insurance, the accounting software, the bank fee. Pick a class for those ("Corporate" or "G&A") rather than leaving them blank. A blank class shows up as "Not specified" on a class P&L, and when that line gets big, people stop trusting the report.

Why card feeds leave these fields empty

A bank feed delivers a date, an amount and the bank's description text. Nothing in that text says which office or department the charge belongs to. Bank rules help with categories. Intuit's bank rules article says a rule "can also apply other info such as payee, customer, project, and more," depending on your settings. But a rule matches on the transaction's text. The same merchant can be a Boise expense on Monday and a Salt Lake expense on Tuesday, and the text won't tell you which.

So the information that sets class and location almost always comes from the person who made the charge. It comes from whose card it is, which job they were on, and what the charge was for. Our feeds cleanup guide goes deeper on why categorizing the feed alone doesn't close this gap.

A coding approach that holds up

What works for most teams, roughly from most to least automatic:

1. Default location from the cardholder. If each person works out of one office, their card's charges usually belong to that location. Set it as the default and override the exceptions.
2. Default class from the merchant or the card. A department's shared card, or a merchant that only one team buys from, can carry a default class.
3. Ask for the rest at the point of spend. Jobs and the odd shared charge need the cardholder's input, ideally when they submit the receipt, not three weeks later at close.
4. Review "Not specified" before you close. Run a P&L by class and by location every month. Any amount in the unassigned column is a coding gap, and the cheapest time to fix it is before the period locks.

Where Summit Spend fits

Summit Spend codes each card transaction before it reaches QuickBooks, using the cards you already have, connected through Plaid. Each charge posts as a credit card expense with the GL account, class and customer on the line, location in the header, the vendor where it's mapped, and the receipt attached. Our QuickBooks Online sync is in beta until Intuit's production app review is complete; until then it posts to an Intuit sandbox (test) company, not a live company file.

QuickBooks Online sync (beta) is on our Starter plan, which covers a GL account plus location. Class tracking, splitting one charge across classes, AI auto-coding and automatic receipt matching are on Professional. Current details are on the pricing page. If your class and location reports have a large "Not specified" line, we'd like to show you the fix on your own card data. Request access.