Expenses

Overview

Every business incurs expenses, but keeping track and making sense of all your business
expenses will go a long way to reducing your tax liabilities. Woosabi is not a full-featured
accounting or budgeting program but provides users with a central platform for recording
their business expenses, without the need to initially invest in costly accounting software.
Expenses does link with Invoices to generate a profit and loss figure that can be a simple
yet useful resource.

Getting started

Click the ‘Expenses’ button on the left hand side control panel to jump into the expenses view. This will
take you to the main expenses view which displays all your expenses categorised by type for the current
tax year. You can set your tax year (e.g. April to April) from within the settings (Click the orange settings
link at the top of the screen and change the end of year day and month – FY stands for financial year).
Click save when you are finished.

Expenses Summary (top of screen)

At the top of the expenses view is the current tax year which is the default view. You can
change to a previous tax year by changing the drop down to see a particular year’s
expenses. Underneath you will see your cash flow digest which uses your total invoices and
total expenses to give you a simple profit loss value for your tax year to date. Just above
these summaries are the print button and a button which will let you see the expenses
grouped by month for the entire year – some users prefer this view as it’s similar to a
spreadsheet.

Expenses History (main screen)

For each expense category you will have a date ordered list of all the items you’ve
recorded with a total at the bottom. Each entry displays the date it was paid, a description,
the supplier it was paid to and of course the amount that was paid. It’s worth remembering
that these are also the required fields you must provide information for when record an
expense item.

Editing items
You can edit an existing expense item by clicking on the title. This will being up the
expenses edit window, once you’ve finished editing the item, just click Edit. You can also
remove entries by clicking the wastebasket icon.

How do I record an expense item?

Simply click on the ‘New Expense’ button at the top right of the screen. This will bring up
the new expense window. Expenses have 3 required fields when creating a new entry,
these fields must be completed in order to record your expense item, they are: the
amount, the supplier and the date you want to record the expense.

What are the other fields when recording an expense for?

Reference, Description and paper copy are all for you to add extra information if you want
to. Description is used on the main screen will appear in the main expenses list to describe
your item. Reference can be used to record a reference number, like an invoice number.
Finally, paper copy can be used to record some helpful information regarding where you’ve
stored the paper copy – this is useful when doing your tax return or perhaps if your
accountant asks you where something is!

Can I create custom expense category?

Custom created categories can provide accuracy problems when users accidentally use/create different
names for the same type of expense. For example, pens, paper, clips, folders don't need individual
categories and should all be recorded as 'Stationery' expenses type, using the 'Description' field to
record the expenses in more detail.

I have some expenses that are the same amount each month/week, can Woosabi automatically
create these for me?

Yes, in Woosabi these are called Recurring expenses.

Recurring expenses are items that your business will regularly pay out at regular fixed intervals. A
suitable example may be a monthly equipment rental where an identical some of money is debited from
your business each month.

Setup a Recurring expense once, and then Woosabi will automatically generate a new individual
expenses record each time it's due.

How do I setup Recurring expenses?

Tracking a recurring expenses couldn't be easier. Simply create the first expense by clicking the 'New
Expenses' button. Input the details of the item then define a frequency value from the 'Recurring' drop-
down option. (e.g. is the expense charged Monthly, Quarterly, Biannually or Annually).

As soon as you click 'Add' the item will be listed on the Recurring page of your Expenses module, and
will automatically generate a new expenses on the Outflow page each time it's due.