Tracking Expenses

Expenses record money your business spends: a materials receipt, a subcontractor bill, fuel, a tool, a permit. Every plan includes them.

Where to find your expenses

There are two places, depending on what you are doing:

• On a job. Open the job and use its Expenses card. This is where most expenses get logged, because most spending belongs to a specific piece of work.
• Everything at once. Go to Settings, then Jobs & Operations, then the Expenses tab. That table lists every expense in the business, with or without a job, and you can search and sort it.

The full list lives in Settings so it sits directly above the accounting codes you file expenses under, which is where you go when you want to see or tidy your spending as a whole.

If you have used BlueSuite for a while, this used to be a separate Expenses page under More in the sidebar, and it only appeared after you switched on a setting. Both the page and that setting are gone. The list is now simply there for everyone with the Expenses module on.

An expense does not need a job

Every expense can take one of three shapes, and you pick whichever matches how the money was actually spent:

• No link at all. A tank of fuel or a software bill belongs to the business, not to one piece of work.
• A job. Materials bought for a specific piece of work. These count toward that job’s profit.
• A single appointment on a job. Useful on recurring work where you want to know which visit the spend belongs to. BlueSuite files it under that appointment’s job as well, so job profit still counts it.

Expenses with no job are added from the Expenses tab in Settings, since a job card can only create expenses for its own job. The appointment list shows visits that already exist. Future visits on a recurring job are still projections until they are generated, so they cannot be picked yet.

Adding an expense

1. Open a job and find the Expenses card, or go to Settings, then Jobs & Operations, then the Expenses tab
2. Click Expense
3. Fill in the name, date, and total, and attach the receipt if you have it
4. Optionally pick a job, an appointment on that job, and an accounting code

Adding an expense from inside a job skips the job and appointment pickers, because the job is already known.

Receipts accept images and PDFs up to 5MB. A paperclip appears next to any expense that has one.

Accounting codes

Accounting codes are your own categories for spending, so your books line up with how you think about the business. They sit on the same Expenses tab, just below the list of expenses.

Each code has a name and, if you want one, a number from your chart of accounts. A code with no number is perfectly valid, so “Materials” on its own works if you do not run numbered accounts.

The Accounting Code field only appears on the expense form once you have added at least one code. If you do not categorize your spending, you never see the field.

To stop offering a code without disturbing your history, edit it and turn off Available on new expenses. It disappears from the dropdown while the expenses already using it keep their category. Deleting a code instead leaves those expenses in place and simply uncategorized.

The expenses report

Under Reports you will find an Expenses report covering any date range. It totals what you spent, breaks it down by accounting code, and lets you filter to one job, one code, or everything with no job at all. You can export the result to CSV for your bookkeeper.

Billing an expense back to the customer

On a job, the actions menu next to an expense includes Create Line Item. That adds the expense to the job as a billable line at the same amount, ready to go out on an invoice, and you can mark it up from there.

The new line is added without a cost of its own on purpose. The expense record already accounts for that money, and counting it in both places would subtract the same purchase from your profit twice.

Expenses and job profit

Any expense attached to a job, directly or through one of its appointments, is subtracted on that job’s Job Analytics card, which shows revenue, what the job cost you, and what is left.

Expenses are one of three costs that card subtracts, and they are kept apart on purpose so a purchase counted twice stays visible instead of hiding inside one total:

• Expenses are money paid out to someone else.
• Item costs are what a billed line cost you to supply. Advanced plan only, and a separate figure from an expense. See Products & Services for how that works.
• Labor is your own team’s hours. If your team has an hourly labor cost on their user record, the time logged against the job is costed and subtracted here too. See Time Tracking for how that works.

Turning expenses off entirely

Expenses is an optional module, on unless you turn it off. If your business does not track spending in BlueSuite at all, go to Settings, then Modules, and switch off Expenses under Optional Modules.

That hides the Expenses card on every job and removes the Expenses tab from Jobs & Operations, accounting codes included. Nothing is deleted. Switch the module back on and your expenses and codes are exactly as you left them.

On phones and tablets the card disappears the next time the app updates, so it can linger briefly on older installs.

Who can see expenses

Owners, admins, and managers can open the Expenses tab and see everything the business has spent. Members and limited members cannot by default, because a company-wide list of every purchase is a different thing from the expenses on the job in front of you. They can still add and see expenses on their own jobs.

To give a member the full list, go to Settings, then Team, then Roles & Permissions, and switch on Expenses for that role.

The Job Analytics card itself is a different matter. It is visible to managers, admins, and owners only, whatever a member’s other permissions say, because it answers how profitable the job was.

On the mobile app

The app keeps the Expenses card on a job, so your crew can log a receipt from the field. The full list, appointment links, and accounting codes are on the web dashboard. An expense created in the app can be categorized later from a computer.

For more on the jobs these expenses attach to, see our Creating & Managing Jobs guide, or contact the BlueSuite Support Team.