Expenses, receipts and profit and loss

Not everything you spend is a bill with lines on it. A tank of diesel, the monthly software subscription, a box of mailers bought on the way home: one amount, one receipt. That's an expense, and it takes a few seconds to record.

Expenses are a tab of Purchasing → Spending, beside purchases. The Everything tab shows both together, with a column saying which is which.

Expense or purchase?

Both are money going out, and both use the same categories, so your reports see them together. The difference is what you need from the record:

• Purchase: a supplier's bill with lines on it, something you're waiting for, or something that goes into stock. Receiving a purchase is what gives your materials a cost.
• Expense: everything else. No lines, no delivery, no PO number. Fuel, fees, subscriptions, postage, a repair.

If you wouldn't chase the supplier for it, it's an expense.

Recording one

Expenses → Add expense. On a phone the first thing you see is the camera: photograph the receipt, enter the amount, pick a category, save. The date starts at today, and everything else is optional.

Under More detail you can add:

• Tax included: how much of the amount was sales tax or VAT. Reports count the spend without it.
• Paid with: card, cash, bank transfer, bank debit, check, marketplace or other.
• Description: a line of text. It's what shows on an invoice if you charge the expense back; left blank, the category name is used.
• Supplier record: a link to a vendor, when the spend belongs beside their bills.
• Repeats: see repeating expenses.
• Charge this back to a client: see charging it back.

Editing an expense with More detail closed keeps all of these as they were.

Photograph a receipt

Expenses → Add expense → Photograph it and be done. Take the photo (or pick a file) and press Read this receipt.

What comes back is a draft, marked To review, with:

• the vendor, date, total and tax read off the receipt. On a computer, pointing at a figure highlights where it was read on the photo.
• a category, from where you filed that vendor's receipts before, or, the first time, from what the receipt says;
• every other amount it found, so "no, the other number" is one click.

A field the reader wasn't sure about is flagged, not left blank.

Confirming is a separate step. Until you confirm it, a draft sits under To review. It's still a real expense and counts in your reports, the way a receipt in the glovebox is still money spent. Confirming also records where you file that vendor, so their next receipt comes up in the right category.

PDF receipts with text in them are read exactly, from the text, which covers most receipts for things bought online. A PDF that's only a scanned image needs a hosted reader; the built-in reader reads photos only.

If the reader can't manage it (a creased receipt, a bad angle), the expense says Couldn't read this receipt with the reason, and the file stays attached. Type the amount and details into the Details card and save, and the expense leaves To review. The reader never guesses a figure it couldn't read.

Company Settings → Receipt reading shows which reader your workspace uses. The built-in one never sends a receipt anywhere. A hosted one reads poor photos better, and sends the page to the provider to do it.

Receipt photos

Every expense can carry photos and PDFs. Keep them: the receipt is what an accountant or a tax authority asks for. Files show on the expense and are in your full data download.

Categories

Expenses and purchases share one list of spend categories, managed under Spend categories in Company Settings → Receipt reading. A workspace starts with 11: advertising, bank and payment fees, booth and market fees, materials and supplies, office and software, packaging and shipping supplies, postage and shipping, professional services, rent and utilities, travel and fuel and other. Rename them, add your own, and hide the ones you don't use.

Two settings make a category more than a label:

• Tax line: where its spend goes at year end, written the way the form words it (Line 8 Advertising). The expense summary for tax groups by it. Outside the United States, use whatever line your accountant asks for.
• Counts as cost of goods: moves the category out of operating expenses and into cost of goods sold. This is for material you buy and use without a purchase: wax bought over the counter with a card is still the cost of making candles.

Merge folds one category into another. Fold "Petrol" and "Diesel" into "Travel and fuel" and every expense and purchase filed under them moves across, and the merged categories are deleted. What the receipt reader learned about which vendors go in them is deleted too, so those vendors come up uncategorized again.

Repeating expenses

Set Repeats on an expense (every week, every two weeks, every month, every quarter or every year) and the next one is written for you on the day it falls due, with the same amount, vendor and category. It keeps going until you stop it. Change or stop it on the most recent one. Editing an older one never starts the repeats again from its date.

A repeat is never marked for charging back when it's written, because the job the first one was spent on is long invoiced.

Charging an expense back

You often spend money on a client's behalf: the hardware picked up on the way to the job, the courier, the parking. Tick Charge this back to a client, pick the order it belongs to, and add a Markup % if you want one.

The expense then shows on the order's Money tab under Expenses on this order, and on the expense's own page you can add it to any open invoice for that order. It goes on as an Expense line, at what you paid without tax, plus the markup, and the text says so ("Diesel (15% markup)"). The invoice charges its own tax on the line as usual.

Once charged back, the expense records the invoice line it went on and can't be charged again while that line exists. Its page shows Re-billed on with the invoice number. The amount, tax, markup and the charge-back tick are on that invoice, so they can't change here, and the expense can't be deleted. The description, category, vendor and receipts can still change.

That's also how you undo one. Remove the line, delete the draft invoice, or void the invoice with release the work back to unbilled ticked, and the expense goes back to Waiting to re-bill, free to edit, delete or charge to another invoice. Untick that box when voiding and the expense stays billed to the invoice that went out.

When the line can't come off, for example because the invoice is paid, owners and admins can Un-bill the expense from its page. The line stays on the invoice and the client is still charged for it. The expense goes back to Waiting to re-bill, so its amount can be corrected, and it can be charged again, so make sure that's what you mean.

An expense can also belong to a project: pick it under Project in More detail, or set it through the API or the import's Project # column. Money spent on a project counts toward what the project cost (without tax), and the project's Overview can put every unbilled one on an invoice at once.

The Waiting to re-bill filter on the expenses list and the Unbilled expenses dashboard widget show money you've spent and not yet billed.

Importing expenses

Import on the expenses list loads expenses from a CSV. See Importing your spreadsheet.

Expenses by category

Reports → Expenses by category adds up the period's expenses and purchases (except draft and canceled purchases) under each category: how many, the tax, the spend without tax, and how much is waiting to be charged back. Click a category to see its expenses. Download it as CSV like any report.

Profit and loss

Reports → Profit and loss puts it on one page:

Revenue
  less cost of sales      (goods shipped, at cost; material bought and
                           used; payment fees)
= Gross profit
  less operating expenses (every other category)
= Net profit

Two ways of counting, switched at the top of the report:

• Accrual: a sale counts when it's invoiced (every invoice that isn't void, drafts included) and a cost when it was incurred. This is the view your accountant works in.
• Cash: money when it moved, what came in less what went out.

They differ by the unpaid invoices and unpaid bills at each end of the period.

Cost of goods shipped is the same either way. It comes from the stock ledger: what left the shelf on a shipment, at the average cost it left at. Waste, adjustments, stocktake differences and stock used on projects aren't part of it.

Through the API

Expenses, categories and both reports are on the public API: /expenses, /expense-categories, /reports/expenses-by-category and /reports/profit-and-loss. A receipt can be posted as base64 JSON or as a file upload: POST /expenses/from-image drafts one and POST /expenses/{id}/confirm confirms it.