Expense Tracking & Budgets

Keep your business finances under control with ClientFlow's expense tracking and budget tools. Record every expense, group spending into categories, set a budget on each category, and see how your actual spending compares.

Adding Expenses

Recording expenses in ClientFlow is straightforward. Every expense is tied to your account and organized by category for easy reporting.

Recording a New Expense

1. Go to Dashboard → Expenses
2. Click Add Expense
3. Enter the expense details:
   • Description — What the expense is for
   • Amount — The cost before tax. If tax applies, enter it in the optional Tax & Deductions section and the form shows the total
   • Date — When the expense occurred
   • Category — Select from your category list
   • Payment method — Cash, bank transfer, card or other
4. Optionally attach a receipt (photo or PDF)
5. Click Save

Attaching Receipts

Upload a receipt photo or PDF scan directly with each expense. Receipts are stored in Cloudflare R2, which encrypts them at rest, and uploaded files are scanned for viruses. Supported formats are PNG, JPG, GIF, WebP and PDF, up to 10MB. Storing receipts digitally makes tax time easier and eliminates the risk of losing paper receipts.

Recurring Expenses

For regular expenses like rent, subscriptions, or insurance, switch on Recurring Expense when you add the expense. Choose how often it repeats (daily, weekly, monthly or yearly), the interval (for example, every 3 months), and when it ends: never, on a date, or after a number of occurrences. ClientFlow then creates a new expense entry on each due date. The new entries are ordinary expenses, so edit one if the amount changes.

Categories

Organizing expenses by category is essential for understanding where your money goes and for accurate tax reporting.

Default Categories

Manage your categories at Expenses → Categories & Budgets. If you have none yet, click Add Default Categories to create eight standard ones:

• Office Supplies
• Software & Tools
• Marketing & Advertising
• Travel & Transportation
• Professional Services
• Equipment & Hardware
• Utilities
• Other

Custom Categories

Create categories to match your specific business needs. On the same page, click Add Category, give it a name, a color and an optional description, and drag categories to reorder them. You can also edit or delete a category; expenses in a deleted category become uncategorized.

Budget Setting

Set a budget on any expense category to control spending and get alerted when you are approaching or exceeding the limit.

Creating a Budget

1. Go to Expenses → Categories & Budgets
2. Add a new category, or edit an existing one
3. Turn on Enable budget tracking
4. Enter the Budget Amount and choose the Budget Period (monthly, quarterly or yearly)
5. Set the Alert Threshold: the percentage of the budget at which you want to be alerted (80% by default)
6. Save the category

For example, a monthly budget of $200 for Marketing & Advertising with the default 80% threshold alerts you once spending reaches $160. The Budget Overview at the top of the page adds up the budgets of all your categories and shows what you have spent against them.

Budget Alerts

ClientFlow checks your budgets once a day. When a category reaches its alert threshold you get an in-app notification, and you get another one if the category goes over its budget. Each kind of alert is sent at most once a month for each category. The Expenses page also shows how many categories are near their threshold or over budget.

Budget Periods

Each budget covers one period: a month, a quarter or a year, as you chose. ClientFlow compares the spending recorded in that period with the budget amount. Every budget belongs to a single category; there is no separate overall budget.

Approval Workflows (Team Plan)

On the Team plan, expenses entered by team members other than the owner and admins can be held until an owner or admin approves or rejects them.

How Approvals Work

1. A team member saves an expense at or above the account's approval threshold. It is marked Pending Approval
2. Owners and admins see a Pending Approvals panel at the top of the Expenses page, showing who entered each expense, its category, date and amount
3. They approve it, or reject it with an optional reason. Rejected expenses are left out of spending totals

Nobody can approve their own expenses.

Approval Threshold

Only expenses at or above the approval threshold are held; smaller ones are recorded without review. The threshold applies to the whole team and only the account owner can set it. The owner sees an Approval threshold box in the approval panel at the top of the Expenses page: type an amount and click Save Changes, or click Turn off to hold nothing. The amount is compared as typed, whatever currency an expense was entered in, and a change applies to expenses saved from then on.

Reports

ClientFlow's expense reports help you see spending patterns and compare them with your budgets.

Expense Analytics

The analytics page (Expenses → Analytics) covers the last 3, 6 or 12 months, and shows:

• Monthly trend — A chart of spending over time, with a Compare toggle for the previous period
• Category breakdown — A pie chart of how spending is split across categories
• Budget variance — Budget against actual spending for each category that has a budget (see below)
• Expense forecast — A projection of the next three months based on your past spending

Category Budgets at a Glance

On Expenses → Categories & Budgets, each category with a budget shows how much has been spent, how much remains and the percentage of the budget used.

Export Options

Export your expense records as CSV or Excel from Import/Export (open the Export tab and choose Expenses), filtered by date range. Export is available on Starter and above. The analytics report can also be downloaded as a PDF with Export PDF on the analytics page. Useful for sharing with your accountant or tax preparer.

Variance Analysis

Budget variance analysis compares actual spending against the budget of each category to identify areas where you are over or under budget.

Understanding Variance

The Budget Variance chart on Expenses → Analytics shows, for each category with a budget:

Metric	Description
Budget	The planned spending for the period
Actual	The actual spending recorded
Variance	Budget minus actual (positive = under budget)
Used	The percentage of the budget spent
Status	Under budget (below the alert threshold), On track (at or above the alert threshold but within the budget), Over budget (more than the budget). The bar color follows the status

Using Variance Data

Review variance data monthly to:

• Identify categories where spending consistently exceeds budget — consider increasing the budget or reducing expenses
• Spot unused budget that could be reallocated to higher-priority areas
• Track the impact of cost-cutting measures over time
• Prepare more accurate budgets for the next period based on actual spending patterns