🕰️ Est. Time: 5 minutes

🎯 Goal: Understand the key information needed to effectively manage Expenses across Streamtime

🔑 Requirements: An understanding of how Expenses and Purchase Orders work, as well as having added Master Expenses into your account

Now that you have a base knowledge around Expenses within Streamtime, you're ready to learn some of the key aspects of Expenses and Purchase Orders, and how you can manage these across your jobs.

If you haven't gotten around to adding Master Expenses into your account just yet or are unsure on the basics, not to worry - head here to get set up.

When it comes to adding Expenses into your Streamtime job, one of the most important aspects is ensuring you add both a cost and a sell for the Expense.

Without this, you will be unable to pull key important metrics within your reports, and it will also impact your profitability across jobs.

Ensuring you add a cost and sell for all Expenses helps you get set up in the best way for reporting, so be sure to add both elements into your Expense at the point of creation.

Sometimes plans change. You may intend to spend on one thing but end up not needing it. Or perhaps you've got several quotes from different suppliers that you'd like to keep on hand, but not formally attach to the job. That's where Expense statuses come in handy. They help you differentiate between what's still in the planning phase and what's actually been executed—similar to how you track planned versus logged time. Simple, but effective, right?

This is the default status when you add a new Expense. This means the cost will be included in your Total Planned Cost, and the sell price will be included in the Total Planned Sell, but the Expense won't be included in Total Used figures.
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​​Use case: You've planned to add catering to an event, but you haven't actually incurred the cost yet. The catering Expense is now included in your overall planned sell (and planned profit margin), but it isn't yet logged against the job or included in projected profitability.

This means the cost will be included in your Total Planned Cost, and the sell price will be included in the Total Planned Sell, and Total Used figures.

Use case: You've had your catering Expense signed off, so you're sure this is a hard cost to the job. Set the status to Approved, and off you go.

Figures for Paid Expenses are included in the exact same way as Approved Expenses. However, you can now differentiate between Expenses that have not yet been paid out. Note that if you have sent this Expense to Xero, paid status will be pulled through from there and cannot be set in Streamtime.

Use case: The caterer has been paid.

Neither cost nor sell prices are included in any figures, but the information is still stored on the job. Good to keep track of alternate supplier quotes, things that fell through, or old budget figures.

Use case: You had budgeted separately for additional desserts, but turns out they were included in the original catering expense, so you've declined this one.

There are a few things you can do with your Expenses within your Streamtime Job - you can see each of these workflows below.

Follow the same steps as above within the Expenses section to duplicate from there.

Follow the same steps as above within the Expenses section to delete from there.

It's not possible to reorder your Expenses from the Expenses section, but it is possible to reorder them within the Job - making it easy to add them to Phases, or move them to 'Other Expenses'.

To see an overview of your Job Activity, which includes any Expenses added or deleted from the Job, head to the Activity area, and filter down to just Activity.

When it comes to deciding between an expense and a purchase order, there are a few things to factor.

This is best handled as an Expense within the job, as it is unrelated to other Expenses, and doesn’t have multiple item types contained within it.

If you’re purchasing multiple items from one supplier, we suggest creating this as a Purchase Order. This helps you keep track of all costs for this specific element of the project.

In this instance, if you have multiple Expenses within a job that you need to add, this is also a good use case for a Purchase Order, as it allows you keep your Expenses together.

If you have rate cards added to Streamtime in additional currencies, Streamtime will automatically automatically convert the rate of your expenses within the job using the same preferences set up when creating the rate card applied to the job.

To find out more about this, head here.

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