Purchases and overhead

Expenses are what people log against a project, often to bill the client. Purchases are what the business itself pays out: the lumber yard, the subcontractor, rent, insurance, software. Record them here and they show up in your Income and spending report, your accountant’s year-end package, and each project’s costs in Profitability.

Open Purchases from the icons at the right of the top bar. Owners, admins, and accountants can see the page. Owners and admins add and change purchases.

Add a purchase

Press New purchase and fill in:

Paid to, the business you paid. Names you’ve used before are suggested.
Amount.
Project or overhead: a project when the money went into one job, or an overhead pool such as General overhead when it keeps the business running. See Overhead below.
Category, from your expense categories.
Date of purchase or bill.
Invoice or receipt number, if there is one.
Paid on and Paid with (card, bank transfer, check, cash, or other). Leave Paid on empty for a bill you haven’t paid yet.
Due on, for an unpaid bill.
Receipt or bill, a photo or PDF to keep with it.
Notes.
Repeats monthly, for rent and subscriptions.

The list below the buttons shows one month at a time, with arrows to move between months and filters for project or overhead and category. Each row shows whether it’s paid, with a link to its receipt.

Bills you haven’t paid yet

A purchase with no paid date and a due date is a bill. Bills sit under Open bills at the top of the page, soonest due first. When you pay one, pick the date and how you paid it on its row and press Mark paid.

Income and spending and the year-end package count a purchase on the day it’s paid, so an unpaid bill isn’t spending yet; the year-end package lists bills still unpaid on December 31 separately for your accountant. Profitability is different: it charges a project its purchases by purchase date, paid or not, since the job used them either way.

Purchases that repeat

Tick Repeats monthly and PayPolka copies the purchase each month on the same day, at 6am in your account’s time zone. A purchase that was paid the day it was made repeats as paid, with the same method. Anything else repeats as a bill, due the same number of days after its date as the original. To change a repeating purchase, edit the latest copy; the earlier ones say where the repeat moved.

Photograph a bill

On a phone, press Photograph a bill to take a picture, or or choose a file to pick a PNG, JPEG, WebP, or PDF up to 10 MB. The photo is saved right away. With AI reading on, the bill waits under To review while it’s read; otherwise you’re taken straight to it to fill in.

If AI reading is turned on under Settings, Spending (Read bill photos with AI), the photo is sent to an AI service that fills in a draft: who it’s from, the dates, the total, the reference number, whether it’s already paid, and the category and project or pool it most likely belongs to. Anything the AI isn’t sure of is left blank. If AI reading is off or not available, you fill the bill in from the photo yourself.

Open the bill from To review, check each field against the photo, and press Save purchase. The photo becomes the purchase’s receipt unless you attach a different file. Nothing is saved as a purchase until you confirm it, and Discard removes the bill and its photo.

Each person can have 60 bills read in an hour. Past that, the rest wait their turn, and you can fill them in by hand in the meantime.

Overhead

Overhead is what it costs to keep the business running, spread across the jobs that use it. Contractors usually price it this way: estimate a year’s overhead, divide it by the work you expect, and charge each job its share. PayPolka does the same in the Profitability report.

Set it up under Settings, Spending, Overhead:

Pools group overhead by how it should be spread. A pool spread by Labor hours (office, insurance, software) charges projects per hour worked. A pool spread by Materials cost (the truck, the yard) charges projects a percentage of their materials. Every account starts with a General overhead pool.
For each year, enter Hours on projects that carry overhead, Materials spending, and an estimate for each pool. Hours and materials start out filled in from the last 12 months. The table shows what each pool has cost so far this year and what it’s on pace for.
PayPolka works out the rates, for example “$22.50 per hour · 8% of materials”. Your numbers will differ.

Purchases charged to a pool are overhead. Purchases charged to a project are that project’s own cost. A project’s form has Carries overhead, on by default; Not billable projects start with it off, since their hours are overhead themselves.

In Profitability, each project carries its hours at the labor rate plus its materials at the materials rate. You can switch between the year’s estimated rates and the actual rates from what was really spent in the report’s period. Below the table, the report says how much overhead projects carried against what was spent, and how much wasn’t covered.