Items, and what about expenses

Adding items, prompting staff for them on a task type, and where a genuine staff expense belongs instead.

Items are the catalogue of things your staff use that are not hours — stakes, a drone flight, a machine-day. This is how to add them, how they get priced and prompted for, and where a genuine staff expense fits instead.

Adding an item

On Items, press Add item.
Give it a Name — what your staff call it.
Give it a Unit — each, day, flight, week — so a quantity reads correctly later.

An item carries no price of its own, the same as a role. What it costs is set per project, on that project's rate table, because the same item can be worth a different rate on two different jobs.

Prompting staff for one

On Task types, the Ask for items panel links a task type to the items that go with it. Tick an item against a task and choosing that task on a timesheet asks staff how many of it they used. Leave a task with nothing ticked and it asks nothing.

An item only appears as something a person can record once a project's rate table prices it and ticks Recorded by staff on that line — see a project's rate table. Until then, the office is the only place a quantity of it can be entered.

What about expenses?

HoursEasy records hours and items used against a project — nothing else. A staff expense claim, a receipt for fuel or a meal, is handled in your accounting software, not here.

If a cost you charge the client has an agreed price — equipment hire, a mobilisation fee — add it as an item on the project's rate table instead. Priced there, it appears on both the invoice and the works summary like any other line.

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