Keeping track of project expenses

Keeping track of project expenses

I have talked to a few support techs and it is very hard for me to believe that Zoho's project accounting software can't keep accounts for my projects. I must not understand what they're saying. We get a contract to build something. So the project revenue is fixed. We build it and so the costs are variable. At the end I want to know how much we spent on that project to figure out our gross profits from that project. 
There are 3 kinds of costs: material, labor and other (permitting fees, commissions, etc). 
1.      Labor is staff (Zoho users) and contractors who get paid by the hour.
 2.    Material is what we buy with purchase order.
 3.  Others are expense that we pay. 

1. Zoho techs  have told me that for the labor part, the staff members time can be kept, but the per hour can be caluculated. For the independent contractors, the time can't be saved, but if we keep that independently, we can pay them like any other vendor. So we have to use some way to keep their time until the end of the project.

2. Zoho techs have also told me that purchase orders cannot be associated to projects. So projects cannot have inventory expenses. You cannot keep track of the cost of the material you use to build the things you build. 

3. Other expense can be paid through the credit card or banking module, but I can, I am told, divide one charge over more than one project. So if I pay commission on two separate projects, I have to enter that as two different payments and deal with it somehow on the banking module. 

How is Zoho a project accounting software if so hard to keep accounts of all the components of a project's expense. What am I missing? 

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