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.
Categories
PalmFlow ships a set of default categories covering the costs resellers actually have — shipping, packaging, supplies, fees, mileage, software, and so on. You can add your own, and importing a file with unfamiliar category names creates them for you, up to 25 per import. Anything beyond that lands in Other and can be recategorized afterward.
Each category is marked deductible or not, which is what separates a business cost from a personal one when the figures reach your tax reporting.
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.
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.