Creating Bills or Expenses is easy to do from several different areas of BuildBook! We'll go over how to create a Bill or an Expense to reflect the project's cost. If you have questions about the difference between a bill or expense, check out our Bills & Expenses overview article.
Create a Bill or Expense
Click on the Financials section within a Project and navigate to the Bills & Expenses tab. Click + Add Item in the upper right.
You can also create Bills & Expenses by clicking on More > Bills & Expenses and clicking on + Add Item:
Add an Expense
Choose + Add an Expense to start tracking items that have already been paid and include the date paid, the vendor, associations to budget items, and other details like receipts.
In order to save a new Expense, you must include the Vendor, Date paid, and Cost.
Add a Vendor (or Payee) - Expenses must have a vendor/payee. You can either choose an existing vendor from your list or create a new one by typing it into the Vendor field. Simply hit the Enter key on your keyboard or click the "Create" option to save it as a new Vendor:
Your vendors are available to you across all of your projects. You can edit your vendors in the Vendors section under the "More" drop down menu. Learn more about managing your BuildBook Vendors.
Date - This is the date you paid the expense. Expenses are not marked as paid because expenses are paid at time of purchase, unlike Bills.
Budget Line Item - When you create an expense, you can optionally associate the expense with an existing line item in your budget in order to help track your cost to date. If the expense doesn't belong to a budget line item, you can keep it as an unassociated cost.
When adding or editing an expense, click the "+ Add Budget Line Item" to access a drop down. Here you can search and select the item/s to associate the expense.
If you choose a line item that is a Selection Category and at least one selection exists, a "New Selection" field appears for you to choose the selection to associate the expense to.
If a selection doesn't exist, a new selection will be automatically created with a default name that includes the vendor name and date.
Description - This is a great place to add any notes about the expense. The description appears underneath the Expense title in the Expenses tab and within a Selection.
Cost - This is the final expense amount that is used to track your costs throughout the project budget.
Attachments - Any attachment can be added to the expense to show proof of the expense. An example of this would be the purchase receipt.
Edit an expense
You can edit an expense directly by clicking on the title of the expense, or you can access the same details by clicking on the name of the expense within any Budget line item or Selection. Edits are saved automatically.
To edit an expense, you must have permissions to edit financials on all projects that the expense is associated with.
Add a Bill
Click + Add a Bill to track outstanding items that need to be paid along with the due date, status, vendor, associations to budget items, and other details like receipts.
Bills work very much the same way that Expense do with one small change, Status.
Vendor - You'll need to add or create a vendor to add to the bill. If you've already created a vendor, scroll through the Vendor/Payee drop down to search for them or begin typing the name of the vendor to have it pull up. Vendors who are not created will have a small Create option so you can add them:
Date - There are two dates for Bills, the Due Date and the Bill Date.
Due Date is the date on the Invoice of when the bill is due. These could be due upon receipt, in which case you would the date in as the day you received the bill, net 15, net 30 or whatever the Vendor's terms are.
Bill Date is the date in which the bill was created or received. This is usually found on the Invoice as the Billing Date.
Status - this is the status of the bill, Paid or Unpaid. Status allows you to see if the Bill is paid but doesn't interact with any totals, so you'll always know how much a cost is even if a bill isn't paid yet.
Bill Number - this is usually the Invoice found on the Invoice as either a statement number or a bill number. You can optionally add this for accounting/tracking purposes.
Budget Line Items - just like in Expenses, you can optionally choose a Budget line item to add your Bill to so it reflects on the Budget. If the bill doesn't belong to a budget line item, you can keep it as an unassociated cost.
Description - The optional description of what the bill is for. The description appears underneath the Bill title in the Bills + Expenses tab and within a Selection.
Cost - This is the final expense amount that is used to track your costs throughout the project budget.
Attachments - Any attachment can be added such as a PDF invoice, scanned receipt image, etc to show proof of the Bill.
Edit a Bill
You can edit a bill directly by clicking on the title of the bill, or you can access the same details by clicking on the name of the bill within any Budget line item or Selection. Edits are saved automatically.
To edit a bill, you must have permissions to edit financials on all projects that the bill is associated with.
Add Bills and Expenses to Selections
In addition to the Bills & Expenses tab within Financials, they can also be added inside of your Selections by opening an individual selection and clicking + Add Item in the bottom left. From here, choose if you'd like to track a Bill or an Expense.
Selections display bills and expenses in a "Cost" column as the costs are associated with each selection.
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