Expense types and costs

Two things in Temponia sound alike and are not. An expense is money someone spent on a project and booked against it. A cost is the hourly rate that a person's time costs your business internally. Expenses are entered by whoever spent the money, one at a time. Costs are set per person by an administrator and sit in the background, valuing every hour that person tracks.

Expense types

Every expense has to be one of a fixed list of types, which keeps reporting comparable and stops the same thing being spelled three ways. Types are company-wide and only an administrator or the owner can manage them, under Expense types in the sidebar.

Select Create expense type and give it a name. Then decide whether it has a unit, using the Unit price (optional) panel:

Leaving the unit empty clears the price, because it would have nothing to multiply. In the expense form the box beside the amount then shows your company's currency symbol instead of a unit, and people type what they spent.

The price is stamped onto each expense at the moment it is saved. Changing a type's price later does not restate expenses that already exist, which is what you want when a mileage rate goes up mid year. Re-saving an old expense does pick up the current price, so avoid reopening entries you do not intend to change.

A unit type with no price bills nothing. Its expenses have a rate of zero, so they are recorded and reported but never become an invoice line. That is the way to track something for internal purposes only, see recording expenses.

Archiving a type

The remove action on an active type archives it rather than deleting it. Archiving takes the type out of the list people choose from, while every expense already booked against it stays intact in the expense list, the reports and past invoices.

Archived types collect in an Archived expense types section further down the page, with Restore expense type and Permanently delete expense type. Deleting is only offered once a type is archived, and it warns you that history goes with it. Archive is almost always what you want; delete is for a type created by mistake and never used.

Costs

A cost is the internal hourly price of a person's time: salary, benefits, the overhead you allocate. It answers "what did this project cost us to deliver", which is a different question from "what do we charge for it". The charging side is covered by rates.

You set it per user. Open the user, and the Labor rate field holds the current cost per hour. Only administrators and the owner can see it: the field is hidden from everyone else, as are the figures derived from it.

Costs are dated, not fixed. Each one has a From date, and adding a new one automatically ends the previous one the day before. Every time entry is then valued at whatever rate applied on the day it was tracked, so a raise in March does not retroactively make January more expensive.

• The first labour rate you enter is backdated to cover everything already tracked, so all history is valued at once.
• Editing the Labor rate field on the user changes the rate currently in effect, rewriting the value of time from that rate's start date onwards.
• To make a change from a date without touching the past, use Manage cost history on the user and add a new entry with a From date. The link appears once the user has at least one cost.

Where costs turn up

The project dashboard shows Cost, Revenue, Profit and Margin for a project once there is a cost to show. The timesheet report can add Cost / hour, Cost and Profit columns, and both are limited to administrators and the owner.

Note what goes into that figure. A project's cost is tracked time multiplied by each person's cost rate. Expenses booked on the project are not part of it, they are reported separately through the expense report. If you want a single number covering both, put the two reports side by side rather than expecting the project dashboard to have done it for you.