Your accountant knows what you spent. This knows what you spent it on.
An invoice in Xero coded to “Materials” tells you the business bought $4,612 of materials. The same invoice recorded against the concrete item on a job tells you the slab cost $362 more than the order — which is a number you can actually do something about.
Available on the Builder plan
Upload the invoice and check it, rather than retyping it
Drop the supplier's PDF invoice in and SmarteBuild reads it: the supplier, the invoice number, the date, the total and the lines. Where the invoice quotes one of your order numbers it matches the lines back to that order, so the comparison below is done before you have typed anything.
What you do is check it. Every figure it has read is shown for you to confirm or correct, with the coding proposed line by line, and nothing is recorded against the job until you say so — which is the right way round for the one document that decides what a job cost.
Why not just type it?
Because the invoices that get typed late are the ones that get checked least, and an overcharge is only a question while the invoice is still unpaid. Faster in means checked sooner.
An expense is only useful if it points at something
An expense floating loose against a job still adds to the total, but tells you nothing about where the money went — and will never show up as an overrun against anything.
A costing
Which job it belongs to.
An order
Where one exists — so committed and actual can be compared. This is the one that earns its keep.
Items or cost centres
So the cost lands in the right trade rather than in a general pile.
A minute per invoice, and the only moment an overcharge is still a question
Once it is paid, you are asking for a credit instead of querying a mistake. Six things to compare:
| Check | Question |
|---|---|
| Supplier | Is this the supplier you ordered from? |
| Quantity | Did they deliver what the order says? |
| Rate | Is the unit price the one you agreed? |
| Total | Does it multiply out? |
| GST | Charged correctly? |
| Extras | Delivery, waiting time, call-out — were these in the order? |
What each mismatch means
The rate is higher than the order
Either the price rose between order and delivery, or the order was raised at an out-of-date rate. Query it. Suppliers generally honour the ordered rate, and the ones who do not will at least tell you the new price applies from now — which you need to know.
The quantity is higher
An extra part-load of concrete, more mesh than ordered. Usually legitimate — site conditions — but it should have been authorised at the time. If nobody on site knows about it, ask.
There are charges not on the order
Waiting time, after-hours delivery, a call-out fee, pump-out. These are the most commonly disputed items and the most commonly waved through. If it was not in the order, it needs a reason.
The invoice is for work not done
Rare, and worth catching. Check against the site before paying.
Small overcharges are the expensive ones. A $362 concrete overcharge on one job is noise. The same overcharge on forty jobs a year is $14,000 you did not price for. The invoices worth checking are not the large ones — those get scrutinised anyway — but the routine ones nobody looks at.
Recorded once, not twice
Expenses export to Xero, so recording an invoice against the job does not mean somebody re-keys it into the books afterwards. Both systems end up with it; only one person types it.
A closer look at expenses
Where an invoice lands, and what it tells you once it has.
What it connects to
Nothing in SmarteBuild is an island — that is the point of it. Expenses & Invoices reads from and feeds into these.
Purchase Orders
Raise orders straight from the BOQ and send them without re-keying
Bill of Quantities
The costed spine of the job — items, rates, markups and margin
Integrations
Xero, Google and Office 365, connected to the job
Cash Flow
What the job costs you and when, projected across the programme
Want the detail?
The help centre documents Expenses & Invoices step by step, with worked examples — written for people using it, not for a brochure.
Start with one job and see
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