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Expenses and receipts
Materials, equipment hire, dump fees, fuel — anything spent on a job that is not time.
Adding one
Expenses → New expense. What it was, what it cost, which job, and a receipt.
Markup is where the money is. Enter what you paid and the markup you charge, and SimpliWork bills the marked-up figure while remembering the real one. Your margin stays visible to you and invisible to the client.
Overhead
An expense with no job is overhead — the software subscription, the truck insurance, the office rent. It is never billable, and that is structural rather than a checkbox somebody might tick wrong.
Track it anyway. It is the other half of knowing whether a month made money.
Receipts
If Require expense receipt is on (Settings → Time & billing rules), an expense cannot be billed without one attached.
Most contractors should leave this on. A reimbursable expense without a receipt is a conversation you do not want to have six weeks later.
Photograph the receipt on your phone and upload it. PDF, JPEG, PNG, WebP and HEIC are all accepted — HEIC being what an iPhone actually takes a photo in, so there is nothing to convert.
What actually gets checked
SimpliWork opens the file and checks what it really is, rather than believing the name on it. A document renamed to .jpg is refused there and then, instead of being filed as a photo that will not open when you need it.
Importing a batch from CSV
Expenses → Import. Useful when a supplier sends a statement, or when somebody has been keeping a spreadsheet.
It works in two steps, and the first one changes nothing:
- Preview. Upload the file and see exactly what would be created, with anything suspect flagged.
- Commit. Only then are rows written.
A template is downloadable from the same screen. Use it — matching columns by hand is where imports go wrong.
Vendor codes are not unique
A supplier's item code usually names a kind of thing, not one purchase, so the same code repeats down a real statement. The importer matches on the row, not the code.
Billing an expense
An approved expense with a receipt can go on an invoice like any line — see Invoices.
Once it is on a sent invoice, the expense is locked. That is deliberate: the invoice is a document somebody else now holds, and the record behind it should still say what the invoice said.