Keeping an eye on your profit by recording your business expenditure with Purchase Records

Recording sales into your business is half of the puzzle when it comes to keeping track of your finances. If you intend to run a profitable business, you need to keep an eye on what you are spending as well. 

You can record your business expenditure using Light Blue’s Purchase Records and this guide will walk through how to:

• Manually record a purchase
• Link purchases to a Shoot Record
• Record capital purchases
• Add purchases to your inventory
• Mark purchases as paid
• Record out-of-pocket staff expenses
• Import purchases from a spreadsheet

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Manually record a purchase

To record business expenditure in Light Blue you can add a Purchase Record. Start by clicking on the “New Purchase” button and enter some basic information about the person or company that you made the purchase from.

Next, you can add some details about the items you purchased by clicking on the green plus button in the Items tab. You can keep this fairly general, or be more specific if you have bought multiple items that you wish to list separately.

Link purchases to a Shoot Record

Purchases directly associated to a particular shoot can be linked to a Light Blue Shoot Record; this helps to show how profitable a particular shoot or type of shoot was. Each Item in the Purchase Record can be linked to a different Shoot Record.

Record capital purchases

Some of your business expenditure will be classed as capital expenditure and you can mark these by checking the “Capital Expenditure” box. When running an Income and Expenditure report Light Blue will display Capital Expenditure separately.

Add purchases to your inventory

When purchasing equipment, you can add these items to your inventory. This is helpful to keep a record of all of your kit, including serial numbers and replacement value to pass on to your insurance provider.

Check the “Include in Inventory Report” box, complete the additional fields and the piece of equipment will then appear in your Inventory Report.

Mark purchases as paid

Once you’ve paid for your purchases, click on the “Add Payment” button to create the Payment Record.

Record out-of-pocket staff expenses

Staff members may incur expenses which need reimbursing; these could be for things like car parking whilst on a shoot or perhaps subsistence during a particularly long day. Enter the details of the purchase and in the “Claimed By:” field choose the member of staff from the drop-down menu. Then once you’ve reimbursed them click “Add Payment”.

Any staff expenses that have yet to be reimbursed (ie not paid) will appear in the “Unpaid Expenses” Report.

From here you also record payments; simply check the “Create new Payment records to pay off these expenses” box.

NB. Payment Records for staff reimbursements will show as being paid to the staff member as opposed to the individual/business showing in the Purchase Record.

Import purchases from a spreadsheet

If you have a list of purchases in a spreadsheet, perhaps exported from some other application like a excerpt scanning service, you can import them all into Light Blue in one go.

Make sure your spreadsheet is saved as a CSV file.

Then open Light Blue and click on “Records” in the main menu bar followed by “Import” in the drop-down menu and choose “Purchases From CSV…”.

You’ll then be able to match the columns in your spreadsheet with fields in Light Blue.

Recording purchases in Light Blue’s iOS app

👉 This help article looks at recording purchases in the iOS app.

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