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.

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.

This needs Professional, for two reasons that are both real costs: reading the receipt spends against a monthly scanning allowance, and keeping the image spends on file storage.

On Starter you type the three fields yourself, which takes about fifteen seconds, and everything else about expenses works identically.

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.

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