Most expense advice assumes one question: what did you spend this month? It's the question tax season asks, so it's the one tools optimise for. But it's not the only way you think about money. You think in jobs — this trip, that client, the rebrand project — and so does your actual profit. A receipt sorted only by date can tell you your March total; it can't tell you whether the Goa client trip made money. Here's how to track expenses the way the work actually happens.
Two ways to slice the same receipts
Every expense can be filed two ways at once:
- By time — month, quarter, year. This is the tax view, and you need it.
- By job — trip, project, or client. This is the business view, and it's the one that tells you which work is worth doing again.
The mistake is treating these as a choice. The same receipt belongs to both March and the Goa trip. Good tracking captures both so you never have to reconstruct one from the other later.
Why the job view matters
Slicing by job answers questions the calendar can't:
- Per-client profitability. What did it actually cost to serve this client? A project that looked profitable on the invoice can quietly lose money once you count the travel, the tools, and the subcontractor you forgot about.
- Travel that has to be itemised. A client trip is a cluster — flights, hotels, taxis, meals — that you'll want as one tidy group, whether for a deduction or to bill it back.
- Billing costs back. If you pass expenses through to a client, you need every receipt for that engagement in one place, not scattered across three months of general spend.
- Reimbursement. Same logic for a team member who travelled: the trip is the unit, not the date.
How to group them in Starlog
Starlog groups receipts into reports by trip, project, or client — so the job view is a first-class thing, not a spreadsheet you maintain on the side. Capture a receipt in the moment, assign it to the relevant report, and it lands in both your monthly records and that job's group at once. When the trip ends or the project closes, the report is already complete — no end-of-month archaeology trying to remember which dinner belonged to which client.
The habit that makes it work
The whole system depends on one small habit: assign the receipt when you capture it, while you still remember which job it belongs to. A taxi receipt tagged to "Goa client trip" the moment you pay is effortless. The same receipt three weeks later is a guess. This is the same reason capturing early matters for the image itself — the context is freshest at the point of sale, and it's cheapest to record then.
Closing out a job
When a trip or project wraps, the report is your deliverable. Export it as a single ZIP — spreadsheet plus every receipt image — and you've got exactly what you need to bill it back to a client, hand a reimbursement to a team member, or drop a clean per-job record into your books. If you run more than one business, the same discipline keeps each one's jobs from bleeding into the others.
The takeaway
The calendar view keeps you compliant; the job view keeps you profitable. You need both, and you shouldn't have to choose — capture once, assign to the trip or client while it's fresh, and let the same receipt serve your March totals and your "did this client actually pay off?" question at the same time.