A billable expense
By building up chargers on behalf of your client is part of doing business. You have to pay your supplies first meaning you will be out of pocket, then hopefully passing on those chargers to your client as a billable expense. The most important thing is to keep track of what charges go with which client. By not passing on these charges regularly means you will be taking money out of your own pocket, which means in the worst case scenario you could actually end up paying for a job you have actually done yourself.

Not a billable expense
Some costs of doing business will be your own expenses and you cannot expect for clients to pay for these. These are things such as power for computers, lighting etc. You will need to include these costs in your pricing but you will not get paid back for them.

Customer Agreements
By having customer agreements you will know whether or not you can invoice for a billable expense, it is certainly not professional to just assume that your clients will pay for the expenses. When quoting a price include whether or not it will include expenses. If you have to travel to do a certain job they will expect this to be included so make sure you do.

Invoicing your clients
When invoicing larger  businesses they will be most likely willing to pay for additional costs, most will assume you will just invoice them for any billable expenses. However smaller businesses may be surprised if you ask them about the extra charges first, so it may make more sense to increase the rates. To make sure you will get paid you need to make to pricing known. A written agreement is usually the best way to do this.

Speak to our Manchester Xero accounting team today on 0800 020 9542 or email hello@JacRox.co.