Expenses overview

Expenses is where you log what the business spends, so that money is set against your revenue and you can see your real profit, not just what came in.

Job expenses and business expenses

You can log an expense against a specific job, or as a general business expense that is not tied to any one job.

A job expense is a cost that belongs to that event, logged directly on the job it relates to. A business expense is something that applies to the business as a whole rather than any single booking, insurance or repairs and maintenance to your equipment are the obvious examples, the kind of cost you would have whether you had ten bookings this year or none.

Use whichever fits the cost. If it only happened because of a specific job, log it against that job. If it is a running cost of operating the business, log it as a business expense instead.

How expenses feed your reporting

Every expense you log, whether it sits on a job or against the business generally, is taken into account when a profit and loss report is run. The report sets your total expenses against everything you have made, and what is left over is your actual profit.

Your dashboard shows this too, as your margin. Margin is your revenue with your expenses removed, so it is the same figure as your profit and loss report, just shown as a running number you can see at a glance rather than something you have to run a report to find.

This is why logging expenses properly is worth the minute it takes. An expense that never gets logged is profit that looks bigger than it really is, right up until you need the real number for something that matters.

Ways to add an expense

There are two ways to log one.

Manually on a job, entered directly against that specific booking on the expenses tab.

Or through your expenses dashboard, using Add Expense, for anything that is not tied to a specific job.

Whichever way you add it, it counts the same way afterward, both in that job's own figures and in your wider reports and statistics.

What sits in the expenses dashboard

There are four tabs across the top: Expenses, Automated Expenses, Categories and Suppliers.

Expenses

The main list. Each entry shows a description, who it was paid to, the amount, the date, the category it belongs to and its type.

Automated Expenses

A separate tab for expenses that are not entered by hand one at a time. This is covered in its own article.

Categories

Categories are how you classify what an expense was for, so your spending breaks down into something you can actually report on rather than one long undifferentiated list.

A set of categories comes ready built, covering common business costs such as repairs and maintenance, cost of goods sold, employee wages and payroll, equipment and tools, and hosting and software. You are not limited to those. Add Category takes just a name, so building your own list to match how you actually think about your spending takes a minute.

Suppliers

Suppliers is your list of who you pay. Rather than typing a payee's name fresh on every expense, you add them once here and pick them from a list afterward.

Adding a supplier asks for their name and has a Regular toggle, switched on by default. This marks a supplier as one you pay often, which is what makes them easy to find quickly when you are logging another expense against them later.

The Add Expense form

Add Expense opens a form with the following fields.

Payee. Choose who you paid. This is usually either a supplier or a staff member. Selecting Supplier reveals a Supplier Name field where you can search your existing suppliers or add a new one on the spot.

Amount and Date. Both required. The amount is a plain figure and the date is picked from a calendar.

Expense Type. A broader classification for the expense, shown as General Business by default. This sits at a higher level than Category, and is what shows in the Type column on your expense list.

Category. Required, and pulled from the categories you have set up. Every expense needs one, so reporting by category is always complete rather than full of gaps where nobody picked one.

Reference. An optional field for a reference number or ID, useful for matching the expense back to a receipt or an invoice from the supplier.

Description. An optional note on what the expense was actually for, useful for anything a category and a supplier name do not already make obvious.

Attachments. Upload a file, so a receipt or invoice can sit against the expense itself rather than living in an inbox somewhere waiting to be matched up later.

Keeping categories and types consistent

The value of all this comes at reporting time, and that only works if expenses are categorised the same way as each other.

Agree on which category covers what before your team starts logging expenses freely, rather than sorting it out after a few months of everyone making their own judgement call. Renaming a category later does not fix expenses already filed under a different one.