Expenses, receipts and profit and loss

Not everything you spend is a bill with lines on it. A tank of diesel, the the monthly software subscription, a box of mailers grabbed on the way home — one amount, one receipt, done. That is an expense, and it takes about ten seconds to record.

Expenses are a tab of Purchasing → Spending in the sidebar, alongside purchases — and both appear together on the Everything tab, with a type column saying which is which.

Expense or purchase?

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

• Purchase — a supplier's bill with lines on it, something you are waiting for, or something that lands in 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 would not chase the supplier for it, it is an expense.

Recording one

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

Under More detail you can add:

• Tax included — how much of the amount was sales tax or VAT. The reports count the spend net of it, because that tax comes back through your own return rather than being a cost of trading.
• Paid with — cash, card, transfer, direct debit, cheque, marketplace.
• What it was for — a line of free text; it is what shows on an invoice if you charge the expense back.
• 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 re-billing.

Photograph a receipt

Expenses → Add expense → Photograph it and be done. One tap opens the camera, one tap takes the picture, and the expense drafts itself while the phone goes back in your pocket.

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

• the vendor, date, total and tax read off the image, each highlighted on the photograph so you can check the number against the picture rather than taking the app's word for it;
• a category, guessed from where you filed that vendor's receipts last time — and from what the receipt says, the first time you see a vendor;
• every other amount it found, so "no, the other number" is one click.

A field the reader was unsure about is flagged rather than hidden. "Is this £48.20?" is a question anybody can answer in a tap; a blank box is not.

Confirming is a separate, deliberate act. Until you agree with a draft it sits under To review — it is a real expense with possibly-wrong numbers on it, exactly like a receipt in a glovebox, so it is never hidden from the reports. Confirming also records where you file that vendor, so the next receipt from them comes up right without anybody thinking about it.

If the reader cannot manage the photograph — a creased receipt, a bad angle — the fields stay blank and the picture stays attached. That costs you four fields of typing. A reader that guessed would cost you a wrong tax return, which is why it does not.

Which reader your workspace uses is shown in Company Settings → Expenses. The self-hosted one is free and never sends a receipt anywhere; a hosted one reads a bad photograph properly and sends the page to the provider to do it.

Email receipts in

Every workspace has an address of its own — receipts+…@in.orderden.app, shown in Company Settings → Expenses. Forward a receipt to it, or point a supplier's invoices at it, and each attachment becomes a drafted expense read exactly as a photographed one is.

Two rules keep it from being an open door: the address is a secret, and the sender has to be somebody on your workspace. A message from anybody else is dropped without a bounce — bouncing would confirm the address is real. If the address ever gets out, Replace it: the old one stops accepting mail immediately.

Turning it off leaves the address allocated but silent, which is what you want after a supplier starts sending newsletters to it.

Receipt photographs

Every expense can carry photographs and PDFs. Keep them: the picture is what an accountant or a tax authority asks for, and a receipt in a glovebox is a receipt you have already lost. Files show on the expense and download in your full data export.

Categories

Expenses and purchases share one list of spend categories, managed in Company Settings → Spend categories. Your workspace starts with eleven — advertising, bank and payment 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, hide the ones you never use.

Two settings make a category more than a label:

• Tax line — where its spend reports 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, put whatever line your own accountant asks for.
• Counts as cost of goods — moves the category out of operating expenses altogether and into cost of goods sold. This is for material you buy and use without a purchase order behind it: the wax bought over a counter with a card is still the cost of making candles.

Merging is there because nobody names things consistently. Fold "Petrol" and "Diesel" into "Travel and fuel" and every expense and purchase filed under them moves across; nothing is deleted and no figure changes.

Repeating expenses

Set Repeats on an expense — weekly, fortnightly, monthly, quarterly or yearly — and the next occurrence is written for you on the day it falls due, with the same amount, vendor and category. The repeat carries forward, so a monthly subscription keeps going indefinitely; change or stop it by editing the most recent one.

Repeating expenses are never marked re-billable when they are written: the project one was originally spent on is long invoiced.

Charging an expense back

Trades and studios spend money on a client's behalf all the time — the ironmongery fetched on the way to site, the courier, the parking at a project. Tick Charge this back to a client, pick the order it belongs to, and optionally a markup %.

The expense then shows on that 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. The line goes on at what you paid, net of tax, plus the markup — you reclaim the tax through your own return, so charging the client tax on it too would be wrong twice over. The invoice charges its own tax on the line as normal.

Once re-billed, the expense records the invoice line it went out on and can never go out again while that line exists. That is also why a re-billed expense cannot be deleted: remove the line from the invoice first.

Removing it is exactly how you undo one. Drop the line, delete the draft invoice altogether, or void the invoice and leave release the work back to unbilled ticked, and the expense goes back to Waiting to re-bill — free to be edited, deleted, or charged to a different invoice. Untick that box on the void and the expense stays billed to the invoice that went out.

An expense can belong to a project as well as to an order. Money spent on a project counts towards what that project cost — net of tax, like every other figure — and the project page can put every unbilled one onto an invoice in a single action.

The Waiting to re-bill filter on the expense list, and the Unbilled expenses dashboard widget, are the "money I have spent and not yet asked for" view.

Expenses by category

Reports → Expenses by category adds up every expense and purchase in the period under each category: how many of each, the tax on them, the net spend, and how much is still waiting to be re-billed. Click a category to see the receipts behind it. Download it as CSV like any other report.

Profit and loss

Reports → Profit and loss is the whole picture on one page:

Revenue
  less cost of sales     (what left the shelf, 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 was invoiced and a cost when it was incurred. This is the view your accountant works in.
• Cash — money when it moved: what was banked, less what was paid out.

They differ by exactly the unpaid invoices and unpaid bills at each end of the period, which is why both are offered rather than one being "right".

Cost of goods sold is the same figure either way. It is read from the stock ledger — what actually left the shelf with a sale, at the average cost it left at — and stock does not know about invoices.

Through the API

Expenses, categories and both reports are all available through 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 multipart upload — POST /expenses/from-image drafts one and POST /expenses/{id}/confirm agrees with it — and the receipts-in address lives under /settings/inbound-email.