Recording what the business spendsNew
Rent, vans, insurance, software — the costs that are not on a job, and what they turn your profit figure into.
Written 20 October 2026
TaskMyJob already records what a job cost you — the receipts your engineers photograph on site. This is the other half: the rent, the van, the insurance, the phone bill. Until those are in, every profit figure in the app is profit BEFORE overheads, which is a real number and not the one you take home.
Step by step
- 1
Go to More, then Costs & overheads.
Anybody who can see your reports can see this. Anybody who cannot, cannot — it is the same permission, because it is the same money.
- 2
Record a cost: who it was paid to, the date on the bill, and what it was for.
The DATE ON THE BILL, not today. A receipt keyed in three weeks late still belongs to the day the money went out, or your month is wrong by however long the paperwork took.
- 3
Put the net and the VAT in separately.
Net is what the thing cost; VAT is what you reclaim. They are kept apart so your costs are not overstated by a fifth.
- 4
Or leave the amounts blank if you have not got to it.
A bill you have but have not typed up is still a bill. It is kept, counted as still to key in, and left out of your totals until you fill it in.
- 5
Set up a standing cost for anything that comes round again.
Rent, a van lease, insurance. Say what it is, how much, how often, and since when.
Worth knowing
A standing cost records nothing by itself
This is the one thing worth reading twice. Setting the rent up in March does NOT put January and February into your figures, and it will not put April in either when April comes. A standing cost is used to work out what is COMING; each month still gets recorded above when it actually goes out. The alternative — writing twelve months of rent the day you set it up — would put money in your books that you have not spent, and every report would then be telling you a plan as though it were a fact.
Nothing recorded means no figure, not a figure of zero
Until you record something, the app does not claim you have no overheads — it says it does not know. A dash rather than £0. That holds everywhere: a category where the only bill has not been keyed in yet shows a dash too, because £0.00 against Vehicles & fuel would be telling you that you spent nothing on fuel.
It is not an accounting package, on purpose
No double entry, no bank feed, no payroll, no trial balance. This records what the business spends so you can see what is actually left. Your accountant's software does the rest, and what is here exports to it.
Job costs are somewhere else, and that is deliberate
A receipt for materials on a job belongs to that job — your engineer photographs it on site and it shows on the job. This page is only for what belongs to the business rather than to one piece of work. The reports add the two together; you never have to.
Switching a standing cost off keeps its history
Stopping a van lease switches the standing cost off rather than deleting it. Every month you already recorded against it stays exactly where it is, and switching it back on costs nothing.