Costs - Book and track the costs of your operations, inventory, maintenance, tasks, etc.

Costs (v2.13.0 - APR 2023)

See also the Costs (v2.13.0) video tutorial. [to-be-released]

Costs - Book and track the costs of your operations, inventory, maintenance, tasks, etc.


TheBoatApp includes a Costs module for fully documenting and tracking of the costs incurred on any operation, inventory, maintenance, task, etc. The respective costs are available in various formats (i.e. table, bar-chart), providing the full picture of the expenditures per boat, trip, time-period (e.g. monthly/yearly), category (e.g. docking), specific asset (e.g. engine), etc. Having available the real costs and full details of past expenditures, you may budget accurately the costs of any forthcoming period. No more draft cost-estimates and conjectures based on poor or missing cost data!

Currencies

All international currencies are supported. Prior to start using them and booking costs, let us take a look on Base and Default currencies and how these are set-up and operate.

Base-currency

The base-currency is used for the internal currency conversions, needed to provide costs booked in various currencies into totals in your default-currency. The base-currency is setup once and doesn’t matter to be the same with the default-currency or not. Although not mandatory, the typical practice is to set your base-currency to the one of your boat’s flag.


Default-currency

You may define a default-currency from within your account’s General Settings. This is the currency to be pre-selected, making costs booking easier and not having to select the currency every time you make a booking. Although the default-currency is pre-selected for all costs, you may still change it on any given record and select another currency. Changing manually the currency on a single record does not change the default-currency, which will be used in the next cost record to be booked. Here are a couple of examples when better to change the default-currency and when not:

  • Ad-hoc currency change (once): your base is in England, thus paying in GBP, but you are hopping occasionally to France making a couple of EUR payments and thus selecting manually EUR on these couple of costs booked

  • Change the default-currency: your base is in England, thus paying in GBP, however you go cruising to France for a couple of weeks where all your payments are in EUR, thus you switch your default-currency to EUR to avoid setting it manually on every cost booked. When back in England, you switch the default-currency back to GBP

How to Access Costs

To access Costs, log in to TheBoatApp, then you may select "Costs" from the left side menu.


How to Register Costs

Select "Costs" from the left side menu and then click "+Add Cost". You are now on the Costs registration screen that appears on the right. Start filling up the data of the Cost item you are adding.


Here below you may see the Costs fields and their functionality:

  1. Name: how you wish to identify this cost-item. Better use something descriptive since this name will appear on various lists and reports later on

  2. Boat: the boat for which the respective cost has been made

  3. Amount & Currency: the cost (amount paid). The respective currency is automatically selected based on the user’s General Settings, however you may select manually another currency if needed for just this cost booking (see details in the “Default-currency” above)

  4. Date: the date this cost occurred (e.g. receipt/invoice date)

  5. Supplier: the store/vendor from where you made this purchase

  6. VAT/GST rate: the percentage of applicable Value Added Tax (VAT) or Goods & Services Tax (GST). The respective tax amount is calculated and displayed automatically below this field

    1. VAT/GST incl./excl.: select whether the VAT/GST is included in the amount entered above or not

  7. Type: select whether the cost refers to goods (i.e. tangible items) or services (e.g. paying a diver for bottom scraping works)

  8. Category: refer to Categories & Customisation

  9. Linked record: does this cost relate with and inventory, task, trip or log record? If so, configure it here to make user that this cost will be booked properly (e.g. calculated within a trip)

  10. Quantity: the newly purchased quantity. In case you have a linked inventory configured for this cost, this newly purchased quantity will be added to the QTY in-stock of the respective linked inventory record

  11. Notes: anything that might be helpful for you to identify this cost. This field is searchable and thus traceable when you are searching for a specific word/number/name contained here (e.g. the price paid for a spare part or the vendor from whom you bought it)

  12. Files: attach any documents, photos, videos or any other files relevant to the respective cost (e.g. a receipt photo, a photo/video of a paint-job/bottom-scrub, etc)

In short, you are strongly advised to include as much info as you can, including uploading any files related to the specific cost such as photo(s), even video(s), about this cost (e.g. a receipt, a pre/after-work photo or video), etc. It might look a bit of extra work for you now but it can come handy when you may be searching how much you have paid for that bottom-scrapping work and to whom!

How to Manage Costs

Edit Costs

On the main Costs screen, on the Costs list-view table, hover the mouse cursor on a cost name. “Details” appears on its right side and by selecting it you access the edit Cost screen where you may edit and change any of the Cost record data.


Delete Costs

After selecting the cost details and access the edit Cost screen (see above), click the trash-bin icon on the top-right-corner. A pop-up window will appear requesting you to confirm that you indeed wish to delete the specific record. Confirm to permanently delete the record.



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