How to add an expense

Click Add Expense from your expenses dashboard to open the form. This article goes through every field on it.

Payee

Choose who you paid. There are two options, Supplier or Staff.

Selecting Supplier reveals a Supplier Name field where you can search your existing suppliers or add a new one on the spot. Selecting Staff lets you choose the team member the expense was paid to instead, useful for anything reimbursed to someone on your own payroll rather than paid out to a business.

Amount and date

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

Expense type

This decides what the expense is set against, and it has four options.

General Business is for a cost that applies to the business as a whole rather than any single piece of work. Insurance and equipment maintenance are the usual examples.

Project and Job each tie the expense to one specific record of that type instead.

Referencing a project or job

Choose Project or Job and a reference field appears, letting you pick which one the expense belongs to. Once selected, the expense is applied to that record automatically, so it feeds into that project, job or order's own figures without you having to do anything further.

Billable expense

Choosing Project or Job also reveals a further checkbox called Billable Expense.

Leave it unticked and the expense is logged against that job or project for your own reporting, but stays internal. The customer never sees it.

Tick it and the expense is added as a line item on that job or project, sitting alongside whatever else is already charged on it.

This is the real decision behind the checkbox. Unticked is a cost you are absorbing and simply want reflected in that job's true profit and loss. Ticked is a cost you are passing on, where the customer ends up paying for it as part of the job.

Category

Required, and pulled from whatever you have already set up on the Categories page. There is no way to create a new category from inside this form, so if the one you need does not exist yet, add it from the Categories tab first and it will be available here afterward.

Reference

Optional. Use this for your own internal reference number, or the invoice ID from the supplier, whichever will actually help you find this again later when you are matching it back to paperwork.

Description

Optional. A free text note on what the expense was for, useful for anything the category and the payee do not already make obvious on their own.

Attachments

Click to Upload lets you attach the invoice itself, either as a PDF or as a photo. Attaching it here means the paperwork sits with the expense record rather than somewhere else waiting to be matched up.

Choosing the right expense type

If the cost applies to the business generally, use General Business.

If it belongs to one piece of work, use Project, Job or Order and reference the specific record. Then decide on Billable Expense. Tick it if the customer is paying for this cost as part of what they booked. Leave it unticked if it is a cost of doing the work that you are covering yourself.