Stop Losing Receipts: How Tradies Digitise Supplier Dockets and Find True Job Costs

Somewhere in every work ute is the graveyard: a glovebox of faded thermal dockets from the trade counter, the servo and the hire shop. Each one you lose costs you twice — once at BAS time, where the GST credit and the deduction go unclaimed, and again in your job costing, where the job looks more profitable than it was because half its costs evaporated.

What a lost docket actually costs

The GST on a $440 materials run is $40 you paid and can't claim back without the record — and the ATO expects substantiation, not vibes. The quieter damage is to your pricing: if the second materials run and the blade you bought mid-job never make it into the job's costs, the job reports a healthy margin it didn't earn — and you'll confidently quote the next one the same way. Lost receipts don't just cost money; they corrupt the data you price from.

The habit: capture it at the counter

The only receipt system that survives a ten-hour day is one with zero steps between purchase and record. Photograph the docket before you leave the trade counter — not tonight, not Friday. Emailed PDF invoices count too: they need to land in the same system, not a mailbox folder you'll never reconcile. And capture refunds and credit notes with the same discipline — returned materials that never hit the record inflate your costs just as surely as lost dockets deflate them.

File it against the job — then against the quote line

A receipt in a folder is a tax record; a receipt against a job is a costing record; a receipt against a quote line is pricing intelligence. Job-level filing tells you what the job made. Line-level filing tells you why: the decking timber allowance held, the fixings ran 40% over, the hire equipment you never quoted at all ate the margin. That's the level where receipts stop being paperwork and start correcting your next quote.

Let the AI do the keying

In Taskr the whole habit is one photo: snap the docket (or add the supplier's PDF) and the AI reads the supplier, GST and line items — refunds and credits detected too — then links the spend to the job and, if you choose, the exact quote line. The job's live profit and loss updates on the spot, and the receipt pushes to Xero & MYOB as a bill with the image attached, so BAS time is already done. Put the glovebox on a 14-day free trial.