Tracking Expenses: Receipts, Categories, and Your Real Costs

Revenue tells you what came in. Expenses tell you what it cost to earn it — and at tax time, every receipt you didn't keep is money left on the table. The Expenses page keeps it all in one place, right next to the rest of your business.

Log an expense

1. •Open Expenses from the main menu.
2. •Click Add expense and fill in the amount, date, category, and vendor.
3. •Snap or upload a photo of the receipt. It's stored securely with the expense — pull it up any time, including years later when your accountant asks.

Do it from your phone in the truck, thirty seconds after you pay. That's the whole habit: if you wait until the weekend, half the receipts are gone.

Categories that mean something

Every expense gets a category, and the categories are split the way an accountant thinks:

• •Job costs (cost of goods): Supplies, Subcontractor, Fuel, Disposal/dump fees, Equipment rental — the money you spend to actually do the work.
• •Overhead: Insurance, Software, Phone, Advertising, Repairs & maintenance, Office/rent, Other — the money you spend to exist as a business.

That split matters: job costs scale with how much you mow; overhead doesn't. Watching the two separately tells you whether a slow month is a work problem or a cost problem.

Finding things later

Filter the list by category or date to answer questions fast: "what did I spend on fuel this season?", "how much has that mower cost me in repairs?", "what's my software bill really?"

Tips

• •Photograph every receipt, even small ones. $12 of trimmer line, forty times a season, is real money.
• •Log subcontractor payments here too — they're a job cost, and you'll want the record at 1099 time.
• •Repairs on your equipment can also be logged per-machine on the Equipment page (with hours and history); use Expenses for everything else.

Available on your phone and desktop, like everything in Lawnager.