How to Track Business Expenses on Your Phone (Tradies)

Here's a scene I've watched play out more times than I can count. It's late June, the accountant has asked for the year's expenses, and a tradie is sitting at the kitchen table with a margarine container full of receipts. Half of them are blank — thermal paper fades to nothing in a hot ute. A few are missing entirely. And there's a vague memory of a $400 cash buy from a bloke at the back of a yard that was definitely a business cost but has no paper trail at all. Every one of those is money you earned and can't claim.

The fix isn't being more organised at tax time. It's being organised in the moment — capturing the expense on your phone the second it happens, before the receipt has a chance to fade or fall out of your pocket. That's the whole game. In this guide I'll show you exactly how to track business expenses on your phone so that by the time the financial year ends, the work is already done.

Why the shoebox method quietly costs you money

Collecting paper receipts and dealing with them later feels free and simple. It's neither. The cost is hidden, but it's real, and it shows up in a few predictable ways.

• Faded receipts. Thermal receipts left in a vehicle can be unreadable within weeks. A receipt you can't read is an expense you can't claim.
• Lost receipts. They go through the wash, blow out the window, end up as a dog's chew toy. Each one is a deduction gone.
• Forgotten card and cash payments. Without a note in the moment, that fuel stop or hardware run simply never makes it onto the books.
• No link to the job. A pile of receipts tells you what you spent in total. It doesn't tell you which job ate your margin — which is the number that actually changes how you quote.

Add it up across a year and the shoebox isn't free at all. It's one of the most expensive habits in the trade.

An expense you didn't record isn't a small admin slip. It's tax you'll pay on money you already spent. Capture it once, in the moment, and it's yours.

The one habit that fixes it: capture in the moment

The single change that turns expense tracking from a nightmare into a non-event is this: log the expense before you leave the counter. You've already got your phone in your hand to tap and pay. The receipt is right there, fresh and readable. That ten-second window is when capturing the cost is effortless. Walk away and the odds of it ever getting recorded drop off a cliff.

A good expense capture takes four pieces of information, and you can get all of them in well under a minute:

1. 1Take a photo of the receipt. Snap it while it's fresh and legible. Now it doesn't matter if the paper version fades or vanishes — you've got it.
2. 2Add a short description. A few words is plenty: "Timber and screws — Henderson fence" tells you and your accountant everything you need months later.
3. 3Enter the amount. Straight off the receipt or your banking app.
4. 4Set the date. Today by default — but make sure the tool lets you back-date it for the buy you forgot to log last Tuesday.

Tie every expense to the job it belongs to

Capturing the receipt is half the win. The other half is attaching it to the right job. When every dollar out is logged against a specific job, two things happen that a plain receipt pile can never give you.

First, you can see true profit per job — not just what the customer paid, but what the work actually cost you once materials and trips to the supplier are counted. That's the number that tells you whether you're quoting too low. Second, when you build the invoice, you're working from real spending instead of a guess. This is exactly how tracking cash in and out turns into invoices built from what you actually spent, rather than a number you hope covers it.

One thing worth getting right: keep staff pay separate from your everyday expenses. Wages behave differently and you'll want them clearly distinguished from materials and supplier runs. If staff payments are part of your jobs, tracking them on their own keeps your real cost-of-job clean and readable.

Projects Plus lets you capture an expense — receipt photo, description, amount and a back-datable date — against any job in seconds, right from your phone.

How to track business expenses on your phone with Projects Plus

I built the cash-out side of Projects Plus around that ten-second window at the counter, because that's the only time expense tracking is genuinely painless. Here's what logging a cost actually looks like in the app.

Snap the receipt photo

Open the job, add an expense, and attach a photo of the receipt straight from your camera. The image lives with the expense from now on, so a faded or lost paper copy stops being a problem the moment you take the shot.

Add the description and amount

Type a short description so future-you knows exactly what this was, then punch in the amount. That's the bulk of the record done.

Set or back-date the date

The date defaults to today, but you can back-date it to when the purchase really happened. So when you remember Monday's fuel stop on Wednesday, you log it against Monday and your books stay accurate.

Because Projects Plus is native on iPhone, iPad and Mac, you can capture the receipt on your phone at the supplier, then review and tidy everything from the Mac at home — same data, no clunky web login. When the year ends, you're not facing a shoebox; you're exporting a clean PDF for your accountant in a couple of taps.

What to look for in an expense tracking app

If you're comparing options, these are the things that decide whether you'll actually keep using it past the first week.

• Fast receipt photo capture — if snapping a receipt takes more than a few taps, you won't do it on a busy day.
• Description and amount in the same flow — no jumping between screens.
• Back-datable dates — so your records match when money really moved.
• Expenses linked to jobs — so you can see real profit per job, not just a yearly total.
• Staff pay kept separate — wages shouldn't muddy your materials costs.
• One-tap PDF export — so handing everything to your accountant is a non-event.

If you'd rather see how the whole money-and-admin side fits together — quoting, payments, staff and invoicing — the features page walks through it, and the app itself is free to download from the pricing page so you can run a real week of expenses through it.

Frequently asked questions