Hello gmer10,
Welcome and thanks for joining us! Billable expenses are a useful tool in QuickBooks Online Plus accounts that allow you to keep track of costs incurred by the business that you'll then need your customer to pay for afterward. I can help explain what's going on.
When you're creating a bill and using the Item section, the Product/Service and related information should automatically be populating on the sales form to your customer. If it's not, there may be a problem that we'll want support to look into further.
I have a feeling what you may be referring to is when you're using the Category details section of an expense or bill and you're looking for that information to automatically populate on the sales form. Information you enter into the Description section will, but the category itself doesn't appear on the sales form because it's not a product or service. Rather, these categories are linked to expense accounts in your Chart of Accounts and a sales form wants a product or service. This is why entering a product or service overwrites the information you've entered: because the expense account is separate from it.
To help with this, I recommend using the Description section of the expense or bill to fill in the information you want your customer to see. Since these automatically copy over, it should help cut down on the time you're spending filling the information in. You can also use the Item section on an invoice to choose products and services that already exist if you're looking to bill your customers specific items.
Check out my screenshots below to see what I mean by my above explanations. The first is how the billable expenses appear on the expense form.
This second image is how these two items appear on an invoice.
I hope that helps clarify how this feature works and why. You can clear more about billable expenses here: Enter billable expenses
Give me a shout if you have further questions. Enjoy your day!
