Recording expenses

A budget is a prediction. An expense is what actually happened: the supplier invoice that arrived, the reimbursement a staff member is owed, the one-off charge that showed up mid-project. Recording that reality cleanly, tied to the right project and task from the moment it's entered, is what makes it possible later to compare plan against actual, recover what's billable, and pay people back correctly.

We'll record a real invoice from a structural engineering subconsultant on Riverside Apartments and attach its receipt.

The type you pick decides what the form asks next

Every expense in Monument is one of three types, and the type is doing more work than it looks like. It decides which field the form adds, because each kind of cost needs a different link to be useful later:

• Supplier Invoice: a bill from an outside firm. The form adds a Supplier field so the cost ties to the contact actually being paid, your structural engineer, in this case.
• Staff Claim: money owed back to someone on the team. The form adds a Claimed By field instead, so the reimbursement has a name attached to it.
• Direct Cost: a cost with no supplier or claimant behind it, a card charge or a fee paid directly. No extra link needed.

Pick the type before anything else, because the rest of the form reshapes around it. Choose Supplier Invoice and a supplier picker appears; choose Staff Claim and that same space becomes a person picker instead. Getting the type right up front is what lets a reimbursement land on the correct person and a vendor bill reconcile against the correct supplier later, rather than becoming a mystery someone has to chase down.

Record a supplier invoice

Northlight Architects has a four thousand dollar invoice from a structural engineering subconsultant for the Documentation set on Riverside Apartments. Here's the full capture.

1. 1

   Open Expenses and choose Add Expense.

2. 2

   Set Expense Type to Supplier Invoice, a bill from an outside firm.

   
3. 3

   Enter the Amount, four thousand, and currency, and set the Date to the invoice date.

4. 4

   Link the Project, Riverside Apartments, then pick the Task, Documentation. The task picker only unlocks once a project is chosen.

5. 5

   Add a Category like Consultants, and a short Description so the cost reads clearly in lists later.

6. 6

   Drag the engineer's PDF into Receipts, images and PDFs up to ten megabytes, up to five files, so the proof travels with the expense.

   
7. 7

   Choose the Supplier contact, the structural engineering firm. If the cost is being on-charged, tick Billable to client and set a markup percentage.

8. 8

   Save. The expense is now recorded, receipt attached, ready for approval.

   

Flip the type and watch the form change underneath you

The quickest way to see the three types actually differ is to change the selector mid-entry. With the dialog still open, switch Expense Type to Staff Claim: the Supplier field disappears and a Claimed By field takes its place, ready for a name, Sarah Chen claiming travel to a site visit, say. Switch again to Direct Cost and both fields drop away entirely, leaving just the bare cost. Everything else, amount, date, project, task, category, receipt, billable, stays exactly where it was. Only the one field that defines who the cost belongs to changes.

Recording is only the start of the expense's life

Saving an expense doesn't approve it or pay it out. It just puts the expense at the front of that process, waiting to be reviewed. From here it moves through approval, and if it was marked billable, it becomes recoverable as revenue on its stage.

Troubleshooting

• The Task field stays greyed out. Tasks are filtered by project, so nothing shows in the task picker until a project is chosen first.
• The wrong type leaves nowhere for the real link to go. Record a vendor bill as a Direct Cost and there's no field for the supplier; log a reimbursement without choosing Staff Claim and nobody is flagged to be paid back. Set the type before filling in the rest of the form.
• Billable got left unticked. A disbursement meant to be on-charged needs Billable to client ticked and its markup set. You can edit both later, but setting them during capture avoids a second pass.
• No project link. An expense recorded with no project attached is tracked but counts toward nothing, it won't roll into any job's costs or ever become recoverable. Link it unless it's genuinely a firm-wide cost.

Where this fits next

The expense recorded here is now waiting for review. Approving expenses covers moving it through that workflow, and if it was flagged billable, revenue from expenses covers how it comes back as revenue.