Business Expenses

What it is

Business Expenses is where you list your company overhead: the rent, insurance, software subscriptions, phone bills and advertising you pay whether or not a single job goes out that week. Joby then shows you a simple profit and loss for the whole company — job revenue, job costs, then overhead, then what is actually left.

The feature is two screens that link to each other:

Where to click. Open Reports›Business Expenses from the left menu (or the Business Expenses card on the Reports page). That lands you on the report. From there, the Manage button at the top right opens the list where you add and edit the bills. On the list, View report takes you back.

When to use it

• You want to know what the business actually cleared last quarter, not just what the jobs earned.
• You are working out whether you can afford another van, another hire, or a price change.
• You want a single monthly run-rate figure — "this company costs $X a month to run".
• Your bookkeeper or accountant asks for overhead broken down by category for a period.
• You want overhead numbers on your dashboard next to the job numbers.

Use Lead Statistics instead when the question is about job-level profit, and Commission Report when it is about what you owe your field workers. Business Expenses answers a different question: what is left over after everything else is paid.

Before you start

• Your role needs the Reports permission. An owner or admin turns this on under Settings›Team Roles, in the Reports & Billing group, on the switch labelled Reports. The same one permission covers both screens — the list and the report. Without it, the Business Expenses row is not in the left menu and the pages will not open.
• Anyone with that permission can add, edit and delete. There is no separate "view only" setting for overhead. If you do not want an office agent changing the rent figure, do not give their role the Reports permission.
• Have last month's bills to hand. Bank statement, card statement, or your bookkeeping export. You will type each one in once — the repeating ones you never have to type again.
• Decide your category names first. Category is a free-text box, not a drop-down, so Rent and rent become two separate lines on the report. Agree the handful of words you will use — Facilities, Insurance, Software, Vehicles, Advertising — and stick to them.
• Your job numbers need to already be right. The Revenue and Gross Profit lines on the report come straight from your jobs. If those look wrong, fix the jobs first; adding overhead will not correct them.
• Your company may use different words. "Lead" can be renamed for your account, so the second line of the report may read Job Costs or Ticket Costs rather than Lead Costs.

Step-by-step

Add your first expense

1. Open Reports›Business Expenses from the left menu, then click Manage at the top right. (If the list is empty you can also click Manage business expenses in the middle of the report.)
2. Click Add expense at the top right. On a brand-new account the table shows a wallet, the line No business expenses yet. and an Add your first expense link that does the same thing.
3. An Add business expense window opens. Fill in Name — this is the only text field that is required. Something a colleague would recognise on a report: "Office rent", "General liability insurance", "Joby subscription".
4. Set Category and Vendor. Both are optional. Category is what groups the line on the report, so it is worth filling in; Vendor is just who you pay.
5. Type the Amount. Enter the amount for one occurrence — for a quarterly bill, type the quarterly figure, not the yearly one. Zero is allowed; negative numbers are not.
6. Choose Recurrence: One time, Monthly, Quarterly or Annual. It starts on Monthly.
7. Set the date. For a one-time expense the field is simply Date. For a repeating one it becomes Start date, plus an optional End date — leave the end date blank and it repeats indefinitely.
8. Add Notes if you want a reminder of what the bill covers.
9. Leave Active switched on, then click Add expense. The button reads Saving... while it works, then the window closes and a green Expense added message appears.

Read the report

1. Open Reports›Business Expenses. It opens on this year so far.
2. Set the period with the date drop-down at the top right — This Month, Last Month, Last 90 Days, This Year, Last Year, a named year, or your own custom dates.
3. Choose how jobs are counted into the period with the drop-down beside it: Closed date (the default), Scheduled date or Created date.
4. Read the Profit & Loss card from top to bottom. It is five lines and the last one is your answer.
5. Scroll down to Operating expenses by category to see where the overhead went, then to Expenses in this period for the individual dated lines.

Put up your prices from a date forward

Editing the amount on a repeating expense rewrites history — the new figure is used for every past period too, so last year's report changes overnight. The window warns you about this. To raise a cost from a date forward and leave the past alone:

1. On the list, open the ... menu at the end of the row and choose Edit.
2. Put the last day of the old price into End date and Save changes.
3. Click Add expense and create a second row with the same name, the new amount, and a Start date of the next day.

You now have two rows. Old periods keep the old number, new periods use the new one, and nothing overlaps.

Stop counting an expense you no longer pay

1. On the list, find the row and flick the switch in the Active column off. The row fades but stays on file, and it drops out of the report and out of the run rate immediately.
2. If you would rather keep the history of what you paid up to a point, set an End date instead. Past periods keep the expense; later ones do not.
3. To remove it altogether, use the ... menu -> Delete. A confirmation asks Delete "Office rent"? — this cannot be undone, and the expense disappears from past reports too.

Send the numbers to your accountant

1. On the report, set the date range you need.
2. Click Export CSV. A Report exported message appears and the file downloads, named business-expenses- plus today's date.
3. Open it in Excel, Numbers or Google Sheets. The top block is the five profit-and-loss lines; below it is one row per dated expense with its date, name, category, vendor, recurrence and amount.

How to check it worked

• Expense saved: the window closes and a green Expense added (or Expense updated) message appears. The row is in the table straight away — active rows sort to the top, newest start date first.
• The run rate moved: under the Business Expenses heading there is a line reading "Company overhead, tracked separately from job costs." followed by a bold figure such as $4,250.00/mo run rate. Adding a $600 monthly bill should raise it by exactly $600. A $1,200 annual bill raises it by $100, and a one-time expense does not move it at all.
• It reached the report: click View report, pick a date range that contains the expense date, and look for the name in Expenses in this period. Its category should also appear in Operating expenses by category with a total and an entry count.
• The bottom line changed: Operating Expenses goes up by the amount, and Net Profit After Overhead goes down by the same amount. Revenue and Gross Profit must not move — if they did, something else changed on your jobs.
• Nothing else broke: open Lead Statistics for the same dates. Its Net Profit should still equal the Gross Profit line on this report. Commission figures should be untouched.
• Switched an expense off: the row goes faded, and it vanishes from Expenses in this period for every date range, including past ones.
• Deleted: an Expense deleted message appears and the row is gone from the table.

Common mistakes

• Expecting overhead to change a job's profit. It never does, by design. Job profit, invoices and field-worker commissions are calculated exactly as they were before you added a single expense here. Overhead is subtracted only on the last line of this one report.
• Blaming the report for a missing number. If a bill is not in Expenses in this period, check three things on the list in this order: is the Active switch on, is its date actually inside your range, and has an End date already passed?
• Ending up with three spellings of one category. "Insurance", "insurance " and "Ins." are three separate lines in Operating expenses by category. Rows left blank are grouped under Uncategorized.
• Getting stopped by a validation message. Saving refuses with Give the expense a name if Name is blank, Enter a valid amount if the amount is missing or negative, Pick a start date if the date is empty, and The end date can't be before the start date if the two dates are the wrong way round. Fix the field named and save again. A red Couldn't save the expense means the save did not reach us at all — check your connection and try once more.
• Recording the same cost twice. If a cost is already on jobs — parts you bill through, subcontractor pay — do not also list it here, or it comes off your bottom line twice. This page is for costs that belong to no particular job.
• Deleting to tidy up. Deleting rewrites your history: the expense disappears from every past report and export. Switching it off, or ending it, is almost always what you actually want.