How to track expenses and receipts

Every trade knows the shoebox: a year's worth of crumpled receipts from the merchant, the petrol station and the café, waiting for one grim January evening with a calculator. Receipts fade, some never make it out of the van, and every lost one is money you paid tax on for no reason.

The fix is to capture the expense at the moment it happens — photograph the receipt at the counter, tag it to the job, and move on. This tutorial covers logging expenses as you buy, putting them against the right jobs, choosing categories that make your Self Assessment painless, and seeing what each job actually made you.

1. 1. Photograph the receipt as you buy

   The moment you've paid — at the merchant counter, the fuel pump, wherever — open Expenses and add a new one. Snap the receipt with your phone's camera and it's attached to the expense, stored safely and legible forever, however faded the paper copy gets.

   Doing it at the counter is the whole trick. It takes fifteen seconds while you're waiting for the card machine, and it means there's never a backlog: no shoebox, no Sunday sorting session, no receipt that went through the wash in your work trousers.

   The add expense screen in TradePlanr with a photographed merchant receipt attached

   Tip

   HMRC accepts digital copies of receipts, so once it's photographed and backed up you don't need to keep the paper. One less thing cluttering the dashboard of the van.

2. 2. Enter the amount and supplier

   Add the amount and who you bought from. A short description helps future-you — “consumer unit, Smith job” tells you far more in April than “materials” does. It's thirty seconds now that saves a head-scratch later.

3. 3. Log the expense against a job

   Where an expense belongs to a specific job — materials, skip hire, a hired tool — attach it to that job. The cost sits on the job's record alongside the quote and the invoice, so the full financial picture of the work lives in one place.

   General overheads that don't belong to any one job — fuel, insurance, your phone — stay unattached. They still count as business expenses; they just aren't pinned to a job.

   An expense being linked to a job, with the job's other costs listed below

4. 4. Pick a sensible category

   Give each expense a category — materials, fuel, tools, insurance and so on. Categories are what turn a pile of receipts into a tax return: when Self Assessment comes round, your spending is already grouped the way you (or your accountant) need it, instead of being one long undifferentiated list.

   Keep the categories consistent rather than perfect. If you're unsure where something belongs, pick the closest fit and stick with it — your accountant can always advise on the edge cases, and consistency is what makes the year-end numbers trustworthy.

   Tip

   If you use an accountant, ask them once which categories they'd like to see. Handing over a tidy, categorised export instead of a carrier bag of paper can genuinely reduce your bill.

5. 5. Check what the job really made you

   With expenses logged against jobs, you can see true profitability: what you invoiced minus what the job cost you in materials and extras. Plenty of trades discover that the jobs that feel busiest aren't the ones that pay best — and that a “good” day rate quietly disappears into materials on certain types of work.

   That's not just interesting; it's how you price. If bathroom refits keep coming in thinner than you thought, the next quote reflects it.

   A job's summary showing invoiced amount, logged expenses and the resulting profit

6. 6. Export when it's tax time

   When Self Assessment season arrives, your year's expenses are already captured, categorised and backed by receipt photos. Export the lot for your accountant or your own return — the January job becomes checking a list, not reconstructing a year from a shoebox.

Fifteen seconds at the counter, every time, and the shoebox problem is gone for good: nothing lost, every claimable expense claimed, and a true profit figure on every job you do.