Profit & bookkeeping5 min read

Tracking business expenses and receipts

How to track the costs that aren't cost of goods — shipping supplies, mileage, subscriptions, table fees — attach receipts, and see them land in your profit reporting.

An expense in PalmFlow is a business cost that doesn't belong to any single item. Cost of goods — what you paid for a thing you're reselling — lives on the item itself. Everything else lives here: shipping supplies, mileage, software subscriptions, booth and table fees, storage, repairs.

Expenses are part of the paid plans.

What an expense record holds

Date — when the money left.
Amount — in your workspace currency.
Category — what kind of cost it is, which is what tax time cares about.
Vendor — who you paid.
Description and quantity for anything bought in multiples.
Receipt — an image or PDF attached to the record.
Optionally a linked item, for a cost that really does belong to one thing.

Costs that repeat

The costs sellers forget are the ones nobody hands them a receipt for: the store subscription, the storage unit, the shipping software. They leave the bank on a schedule and never get written down, so the deduction goes unclaimed. A $27.95 monthly store subscription is $335.40 a year.

Under Recurring on the Expenses page, describe the cost once — amount, what it is, category, how often, and the date of the first charge — and PalmFlow logs a real expense on each day it comes due.

Nothing is written ahead of time. The expense appears on the day it's actually due, dated that day, so a month that hasn't happened yet never carries money it shouldn't. Each one lands on your ledger marked repeats monthly (or weekly, or yearly), so it's always clear where a row you didn't type came from.

Every rule stays on the page with its next charge date, and each has:

Skip next — for the month you were refunded, or the renewal you canceled late. The one after it still lands on schedule.
Pause — stops it logging anything until you turn it back on.
Delete — stops it for good. The expenses it already logged stay exactly where they are, because you really did pay them.

A series billed on the 31st comes back to the 31st after a short month rather than drifting earlier each year, which is how the card issuer bills it.

Recurring costs sit on the same paid plans as the rest of expense tracking.

Receipts

Attach a photo or PDF to any expense and it stays with the record. Receipts are held in private storage and served through short-lived signed links — they are never public, and they are never mixed in with your listing photos.

The same attachment works on items, so a purchase receipt can sit with the thing you bought as well as with the expense.

Importing expenses

You don't have to enter a year of costs by hand. The expenses importer takes a CSV from a spreadsheet, an old tool, or a bank or card statement export:

1Open Expenses → Import CSV.
2Pick your file. PalmFlow shows what it read before writing anything.
3Confirm. Anything that looks off — a missing amount, an unreadable date — is listed first.

Negative amounts are treated as costs, so a statement export where money out is written as -24.99 imports correctly. Rows matching an existing expense on date, description, amount, and vendor are skipped rather than duplicated, so re-running the same statement is safe. Imports cap at 2,000 rows per file, and any import can be undone in one click.

There is no bank feed. PalmFlow does not connect to your bank or card accounts. Expenses arrive by hand or by CSV, which is a deliberate choice — it means no third party holds credentials to your accounts on our behalf.

Where expenses show up

On the Reports page as Other expenses, sitting below cost of goods in the profit statement.
As deductible expenses in the tax-season figures; see Tax reports.
In your net profit everywhere it's shown, so the dashboard figure is what's left after the whole business, not just after what you paid for stock.

Common questions

Can PalmFlow track reseller business expenses?

Yes. The Expenses page records costs that aren't tied to a single item — shipping supplies, mileage, subscriptions, booth and table fees — each with a date, category, vendor, and amount, and each flows into your net profit.

Does PalmFlow connect to my bank account?

No. PalmFlow has no bank feed. Expenses are entered by hand or imported from a CSV, including a bank or card statement export.

Can PalmFlow track recurring expenses like an eBay Store subscription?

Yes. Describe the cost once and set it to repeat weekly, monthly, or yearly, and PalmFlow logs it on each day it falls due. A $27.95 monthly store subscription is $335.40 a year of deductions that otherwise go unclaimed. You can skip a single charge, pause the whole thing, or delete it — and deleting it leaves the expenses it already logged on your books.