Every Payment. Tracked and Explained.

Capture beats categorisation

A photographed receipt with no category is worth far more than a perfect category applied to a receipt you no longer have. Get the record in first; the classification can be fixed later, and increasingly is fixed automatically from the transaction description.

This is why bank statement upload matters more than any manual entry screen. Most spending already exists as a bank transaction. Parsing the statement gets you 80% of the picture without anyone typing anything, and the remaining 20% — cash, personal cards, petty cash — is where deliberate capture is worth the effort.

Categories that earn their keep

Most small businesses either use three categories or forty. Both are useless. Three is too coarse to act on; forty means nothing is ever categorised consistently. Between eight and fifteen, chosen to match how you actually make decisions, is the useful range.

A workable Nigerian starting set:

• Cost of goods or direct project costs — the spend that scales with revenue.
• Salaries and contractor fees, kept separate because their tax treatment differs.
• Rent and service charge.
• Power: grid, generator fuel and maintenance, which for many businesses is a top-three line.
• Transport and logistics.
• Software and subscriptions.
• Professional fees — legal, accounting, consultancy.
• Marketing.
• Bank charges and payment processing fees, which are invisible until you total them.
• Taxes and levies.

What you can and cannot deduct

The statutory test is whether the cost was incurred wholly, exclusively, necessarily and reasonably for the business. In practice the contested items are always the same: a phone used for both, a car used for both, a room at home used for work, and entertainment.

Apportion honestly and write down the basis at the time. An apportionment you can explain — "60% of the phone bill, based on the split of business and personal use" — survives a query. One invented afterwards does not.

The number nobody tracks

Recurring subscriptions are the quiet leak. Software bought for one project, a plan upgraded during a busy month, a tool two people are separately paying for. None is large enough to notice individually and together they are frequently the difference between a profitable month and a flat one. Review anything that renews automatically once a quarter.