Expenses come into play for any third-party costs that you either have covered or will rack up during a project. This could range from freelance team members and suppliers to license fees and even taxi fares. Essentially, they're anything you're shelling out for in addition to the cost of your in-house team.

Add these to the job by using the Create > Expense button within the job. 

When adding the expense, you can price this depending on your preference. There are three ways of pricing an expense:

Unit Rate Expense

Set a quantity, then a unit rate, and the total sell price of the expense will update

Markup Expense

Set a cost rate, then a markup, and the total sell price of the expense will update

Total Sell Expense

Set the total sell price itself straight away — that's the fixed sell of the item

Pro tip: you can also set up frequently used unit rate and markup expenses in Master Settings

Since these are, by nature, third-party costs, it's important to factor in a cost rate. This ensures your profitability reports hit the mark. Got business dealings in different currencies? No worries—you can log expenses in foreign currency if you've got multi-currency enabled. Feel free to add descriptions, supplier details, references, and dates to keep everything in tip-top order. It's all about giving you the flexibility to manage expenses your way, without complicating matters.

You can also add labels to your expenses to help classify them and make searching for particular expenses easier.

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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​Say 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.

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.

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.

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

Sometimes a supplier might need an official purchase order to start the job. You might have logged a Draft Expense, that needs to now be converted into a promise to the lucky supplier.

Simply convert the Expense to a Purchase Order and get going. Purchase Orders have the same status options as Expenses, with the same effect on the job's figures.

​Learn how to create & send purchase orders to your suppliers.

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Yes. You can send Expenses and Purchase Orders directly into your connected accounting package.

Read about how Expenses and Purchase Orders work with Streamtime and Xero.