Keeping an eye on your profit by recording your spending with Purchases

Introduction

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

You can record your business expenditure with purchase records, which helps you to see how profitable the business is.

This guide will walk through how to:

• Manually record a purchase
• Link items to a shoot
• Record capital purchases
• Add items like equipment to your inventory
• Mark a purchase as paid
• Import purchases from a spreadsheet

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Manually recording a purchase

To record some expenditure to your business in Light Blue you can add a purchase record. Start by entering some basic information about the person or company that you made the purchase from

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

Linking items to a shoot

Expenditure that is directly associated to a particular shoot can be linked to a shoot record in Light Blue, This helps to show how profitable a particular shoot or type of shoot was. Each item in the purchase can be linked to a different shoot.

Not all of your business expenditure is directly associated to one shoot, and purchases that are more general (equipment, marketing, insurance, software subscriptions, etc.

Capital purchases

Some of your purchases would be classed as capital expenditure and you can mark those purchases by checking the Capital checkbox. When running an income and expenditure report later, Light Blue will display that expenditure separately.

Adding items like equipment to you inventory

When purchasing equipment, you can add the purchased item 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.

To add a purchase item to the inventory, click on the Inventory checkbox and then complete the additional fields.

The item will then appear in your inventory report.

Marking a purchase as paid

Once you’ve paid for the goods or services that you’ve purchased, you can click on the Mark As Paid button to indicate that you’ve given your supplier the money.

Importing 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, then it’s possible to import all of those purchases in to Light Blue at once.

First of all, make sure that the spreadsheet is saved as a CSV file.

Next, open Light Blue and click on the Records menu, in the Import section there’s an option to a Import Purchases From CSV.

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