Expenses

The Expenses tab on a project is where every cost lands, no matter where it came from. Some rows show up on their own as other parts of the app run; others you add by hand.

Where the costs come from

• Subtrade costs: when you issue a purchase order to a subtrade, the PO amount becomes a cost row automatically. If the job grows and you issue a supplemental PO, that's a second row.
• Materials and equipment: when a work order is marked complete, its materials and equipment lines are copied into the Expenses tab as cost rows, priced from each item's catalog cost (or the cost entered on the work order itself, if someone overrode it).
• Labor: hours logged in time tracking show up here too, priced at each crew member's hourly cost rate. This section is only visible to people with payroll access, since cost rates are sensitive.
• Vendor invoices and manual expenses: anything you enter yourself — a receipt from the hardware store, an invoice from a rental company, a reimbursement. These are the only two kinds of row you can edit or delete after the fact.

Revenue, job costs and profit

The three figures across the top of the tab answer one question: how is this job actually doing right now? Both of the first two count work that's underway, not just work that's finished being paid for or billed.

Job costs is what you've committed plus what's in flight. Committed means real cost rows — approved vendor invoices, subtrade POs, completed work orders, and logged hours. In flight means materials and equipment sitting on work orders that are still open. That second part is a projection, so it can't be billed to a client or sent to QuickBooks until the work order is completed. Those rows sit in the table with everything else, marked as projected, so you can always see which work orders the figure comes from.

Revenue is what you've invoiced plus what your current estimates say you still have left to bill. That's what lets a job show a margin before the first invoice goes out — while it's been priced and the crew is on site. Drafts count as well as approved estimates, which is deliberate: a job running at 3% is worth knowing about while the estimate is still something you can edit.

Three things follow from how the not-yet-invoiced part is worked out:

• Raising an invoice moves money from the not-yet-invoiced side to the invoiced side. The Revenue total, the profit and the margin don't move.
• Progress billing works the same way. A $9,000 invoice against a $24,600 estimate leaves $15,600 still to bill, not a $9,000 job.
• If you bill past the estimate — a change order invoiced but never estimated — the invoiced figure wins and the projection drops to zero.

Profit is revenue minus job costs, with the margin beside it. Whenever any of the revenue behind it hasn't been billed yet, the tile says so: that margin is a projection, not money in the bank. Sales tax is left out of all three figures on both sides, so the margin is a true gross margin.

The only time no margin appears is a job with no estimate and no invoice — there's nothing to work it out from.

Scanning a receipt

When you add a vendor invoice or manual expense, drop a photo or PDF of the receipt into the upload area, or click to browse for the file. A photo gets read automatically — the vendor name, amount, and reference number come back filled in within a few seconds, and you just check them over before saving. PDFs aren't auto-read yet; attach the file and fill in the details yourself.

Approving vendor invoices

Vendor invoices start in a pending state until someone with approval permission reviews and approves them. Before you approve one, the system checks whether a different invoice from the same vendor with the same reference number has already been approved on this project. If it finds one, it stops you and asks you to confirm — approving a real duplicate would pay the same invoice twice. If you're sure it's a separate invoice (a vendor re-using a number, say), you can approve it anyway.

Moving an expense to another project

Sometimes a cost gets recorded against the wrong project. Manual expenses and vendor invoices can be moved to a different project from their row menu — pick the target project and the cost relocates, along with a note in the activity log. Subtrade costs and work-order materials can't be moved this way; they're tied to the purchase order or work order that created them, so if that record needs to move, move it instead and the cost follows.

Billable costs and the Invoices tab

Any cost you mark billable, and that hasn't already been pulled onto a client invoice, sits in the Invoices tab's unbilled queue waiting to be added to the next invoice. Costs you don't mark billable — an internal tool rental, say — never show up there.

Sending subtrade invoices to QuickBooks

Once a subtrade invoice is approved, you can push it to QuickBooks as a Bill in accounts payable directly from its row. This only runs once per invoice — QuickBooks won't let the same bill go through twice, so there's no risk of double-paying a subtrade by clicking it again.