Overview
Expense Reports cover what you spend on jobs - where the money goes by category, what you charged the customer for each cost, and which costs you haven't passed on yet.
Two reports in this group. The second one is where contractors most often find money they've already spent and never billed.
Available in the Web App. See Reports: Overview and Where to Find What for the shared controls.
When to Use This Group
You're looking for costs you forgot to bill a customer for.
You want to check the markup you're actually achieving on materials.
You're deciding whether to buy a tool you keep renting.
You're reviewing spend before closing out a month.
A job's margin looks thin and you want to see where the cost went.
The Two Numbers on Every Expense
Every expense in these reports carries two figures, and the gap between them is the point:
Cost - what you paid.
Price - what the customer was charged.
Price minus Cost is your material margin, expense by expense. A line where the two match is a cost you passed through at no markup; a line where Price is blank or zero is a cost you absorbed. Both are sometimes right - and both are worth being deliberate about rather than discovering at year end.
Category Based Expense Breakdown
Filter between purchases, returns, tools, and rentals.
Every expense logged against your jobs. Each row shows the date, the Type - purchase, return, tool, or rental - the Cost and Price, its status, the account and work order it belongs to, who logged it, any note, and the attached receipt.
An overview view rolls it up by type: how many expenses of each kind, total cost, and total price - where the money goes at a glance, and what you charged for it.
What each type tells you:
Purchases - materials bought for jobs. The Cost/Price gap here is your realised material markup, which you can check against the margin you think you charge.
Returns - materials sent back. These reduce your cost, and on cost-plus jobs they're deducted from what you bill. Consistently high returns point at over-ordering or estimating problems, and every return is a trip someone made.
Tools - tools bought.
Rentals - equipment rented. Compare against Tools: three months of rental spend on the same item is usually enough to justify buying it, and the overview gives you that number rather than the impression that it feels like a lot.
The User column tells you who's logging expenses - and, read against your crew list, who isn't. A tech who never logs a receipt isn't buying nothing; their costs are landing somewhere unaccounted.
See Materials on Web Page for how these are recorded.
Uninvoiced Expenses
Expenses not linked to any invoice.
Materials and costs recorded against jobs that haven't been billed to the customer.
On cost-plus work this is straightforwardly money owed to you. You bought the parts, the customer agreed to pay for parts, and nobody has invoiced them. Run this monthly.
Every line is one of two things: a cost to bill, or a cost that belongs on a different job. Both are worth resolving, and the second kind quietly distorts your Job Costing until you do.
Not everything here is billable. On fixed-price work, materials are covered by the agreed total rather than invoiced separately, so those expenses appearing here is expected.
This also affects job closing - uninvoiced materials block a work order from closing when that rule is enabled. See Guided Work Order Closing.
Read it alongside Uninvoiced Timesheets. Together they show your total unbilled position - labour and materials.
Reading the Group Together
One report is about recovering money, the other about controlling it.
Uninvoiced Expenses is a to-do list - work through it and send invoices. Category Based Expense Breakdown is an analysis - look at it monthly and act on the patterns, starting with the Cost/Price gap.
Neither tells you whether a job was profitable. Costs only mean something next to what you collected, which is Job Costing. See Work Reports.
Tips & Best Practices
Run Uninvoiced Expenses with Uninvoiced Timesheets. Same trip, and together they show everything you've earned but not asked for.
Audit the Cost/Price gap quarterly. It's the difference between the markup you quote and the markup you achieve, and drift between them is invisible everywhere else.
Record materials as they're bought, not at month end. Receipts recorded late get billed late or not at all. Receipt scanning on mobile makes this quick - see AI Feature: Materials.
Compare rentals to tools quarterly. The overview gives you the buy-versus-rent number per category.
Investigate a rising returns figure. It's usually an ordering or estimating problem, and it costs labour as well as money.
Check expenses are on the right job. A misfiled cost makes one job look unprofitable and another look better than it was.
Things to Know
Every expense carries both Cost (what you paid) and Price (what the customer was charged). The gap is your margin on that expense.
The overview rolls expenses up by type with count, total cost, and total price.
Each expense records who logged it, its note, and the attached receipt.
Expenses on fixed-price jobs appear in Uninvoiced Expenses and usually shouldn't be billed separately.
On cost-plus jobs, returns are deducted from purchases and rentals when billing.
Uninvoiced materials can block work order closing when that closing rule is enabled.
Both reports export to CSV, XLS, and XLSX.
Material expense visibility can be permission-gated by role.
Troubleshooting
Cost and Price are identical on most lines.
Materials are being passed through with no markup. If that's not your policy, check how your team is entering material prices - the report is showing you the practice, not the policy.
Uninvoiced Expenses is full of fixed-price jobs.
Expected. Fixed-price work bills at its agreed total, so materials aren't invoiced line by line.
An expense is on the wrong job.
Edit it on the work order and move it. Worth doing promptly - it's affecting both jobs' costing until you do.
My returns figure looks larger than expected.
Check whether returns are being recorded against the right jobs. On cost-plus work they reduce what you bill, so a misplaced return costs you money directly.
A material I recorded isn't showing.
Check the date range, and confirm it was saved against a job rather than left incomplete.
I can't see material expenses.
Material expense access is permission-controlled. Ask an admin to review your role.
Have questions? Reach out via the support chat or email support@motionops.com.