Expenses

An expense is money going out. Put it against a job and it becomes part of that job’s cost; leave it unassigned and it is an operating cost of the business. Both matter, and the difference between them is the difference between knowing a job’s margin and guessing it.

Record an expense

Open Expenses and add one, or add it from the job so the job is filled in for you and you land back on the job afterwards.

Categories follow IRS Schedule C, which is not an arbitrary choice — it means your expense records already line up with the form your accountant is going to fill in.

Decide whether it belongs to a job

• Against a job — materials, a subcontractor, a permit. These are direct costs and they come off that job’s margin.
• Against nothing — tools, fuel, office supplies, insurance. These are operating costs of the business.

Getting this right is what makes job costing honest. Assign the whole month’s fuel to one job and that job looks terrible while nine others look better than they are.

You can add, change or remove the job on an expense later if you filed it wrong the first time, and the jobs’ costs follow: moved, it comes off the first job and onto the second; with its amount corrected, its job’s costs change by the difference.

With Projects on, an expense on a job with a plan can also name its Milestone — the stage of the work it was for — so the job’s Financials can say what each stage cost. Left on Not tied to a milestone, it counts against the job alone. Moved to another job, it loses the first job’s milestone.

Say which lead source your advertising paid for

An expense in the Advertising category can name the lead source it paid for — Angi’s monthly bill, the yard signs, the directory listing. Pick the source under Lead source it paid for; for an integration, say which one, spelled as it appears on your clients’ pages (Angi, Thumbtack).

Where your profit comes from then sets what each source cost against what its customers earned. Advertising that names no source still counts — it is shown as its own line.

Only Advertising expenses name a source. Change an expense to another category and its source goes with it.

Scan the receipt instead of typing it

Upload a photo or a PDF of the receipt — PNG, JPG or PDF, up to 10 MB — and the vendor, date and amount are read off it and used to fill in the form. You confirm or correct what it read, save, and the receipt is attached to the expense.

Reading the receipt needs Professional, because it spends against a monthly scanning allowance.

On Starter you type the three fields yourself, which takes about fifteen seconds, and keep the receipt anyway: Upload receipt on the expense’s Receipt panel takes a JPG, PNG, GIF, WebP or PDF up to 5 MB, on every plan. A receipt counts against your business’s storage, and when storage is full the panel says so instead.

Scan a receipt from the job site

On the crew’s phone, a visit to a job has Receipts with Scan a receipt. Whoever is on the job photographs the receipt where they bought it, and the vendor, date and total are read off it. They check what it read, add what it was for if they like, and Save to this job puts it on that job as an expense under Supplies, with the receipt kept on it. The office changes its category, amount or job afterwards like any expense.

• Only for the job they are on. Nobody scans onto a job they are not on, and the crew has no other way to add or change an expense — apart from confirming a purchase on their own card, with Purchases matched to jobs.
• The same allowance as the office’s scan. It reads against your business’s monthly scanning allowance and needs Professional, as scanning in the office does; on a plan without it, the visit does not offer it.
• The expense stands without its receipt. When storage is full the expense is still saved, and the crew is told the receipt was not kept.

Void an expense rather than deleting it

Voiding takes the expense out of every report and calculation and keeps the record. A voided expense stops affecting a job’s margin immediately, and can be unvoided if it was voided in error. An expense that came from a bank transaction gives the transaction back to be sorted again when it is voided.

An expense SMG Tools voided for you says why: a Thumbtack lead’s cost reads Voided — Refunded by Thumbtack when Thumbtack gives the lead’s price back.

An expense made from a supplier bill, with Purchasing, changes only with its bill: it has no Edit or Void, and Open the bill takes you to it. Its job already counts those parts from when they arrived, so the expense never counts on the job’s margin a second time.

Nothing here hard-deletes, so the question “what happened to that $900 we recorded in March” always has an answer.