The subtotal item in QuickBooks can be useful if you want to provide a summary of the price of items you are selling in an order form. Unfortunately, if you try to get tricky with multiple levels of subtotals you may find that this feature doesn’t work the way you might expect. In this article, Charlie Russel explains how subtotals work in QuickBooks and a work-around to get them to work more like you would expect.

http://qbblog.ccrsoftware.info/2009/08/using-subtotals-in-quickbooks-orders/