Expenses

Running a business costs money. Every naira, cedi, or shilling you spend — on stock, delivery, packaging, tools, staff, rent — is an expense. And if you're not tracking those expenses, you don't actually know how profitable your business is.

Catlog's expense management lets you record, categorize, and track every business cost in one place.

An expense is any money your business spends to operate or fulfill orders. This includes:

The more expenses you record accurately, the more your profit figures reflect what's really happening.

Catlog gives you several ways to record expenses, depending on how the cost comes up:

Manually — The most direct way. Open the expenses section, enter the amount, category, and description, and optionally link it to a recipient (the person or business you paid).

From a withdrawal — When you make a withdrawal from your Catlog wallet, you can tag it as a business expense. Catlog creates the expense record automatically with the withdrawal amount and date.

From a past transaction — If you made a withdrawal earlier but forgot to mark it as an expense, you can go back and create the expense record retroactively from that transaction.

Automatically from a delivery order — When you create a delivery order, Catlog automatically generates a delivery expense linked to that order. You can edit it later once the actual delivery cost is confirmed.

From a sale — You can record expenses directly against a specific order to capture costs tied to fulfilling it.

Every expense belongs to a category. Categories help you understand where your money is going — and make your expense analytics actually meaningful. When you're reviewing your finances, you'll be able to see which categories are eating the most of your budget.

A recipient is anyone your business pays money to — a supplier, a delivery service, a freelancer, a landlord. When you create an expense, you can link it to a recipient.

Over time, this gives you a clear view of your largest payees and upcoming payment obligations.

Not every expense gets paid in full immediately. If you've received stock but haven't paid the supplier completely, you can record the expense as partially paid. Catlog automatically creates a merchant debt for the outstanding balance.

As you make payments toward the expense, you record them against the debt. This keeps your liabilities accurate without requiring you to remember what you owe and to whom.

Every expense you record reduces your net profit for the period. This is what makes the profit figure in your analytics meaningful — it's not just revenue minus cost of goods, it's revenue minus everything your business actually spent.

Expenses feed directly into your financial overview, expense analytics, and daily reports.

💡 A business that only tracks income but not expenses will always think it's doing better than it is. Recording your expenses is how you find out what's actually left.