Bills and costs
Maintaining a fleet involves tracking costs across many tasks — labor, spare parts, and other expenses. Floatist lets you record these costs on individual tasks and then group them into bills for invoicing boat owners or other parties.
Task billables
Section titled “Task billables”Every task can have costs attached to it. These are called billables and come in three types:
- Labor: Time spent by a staff member, with optional notes. You can add multiple labor entries per task if different people worked on it.
- Inventory item: Parts consumed from your warehouse. When you add an inventory item to a task, it is automatically valued at the item’s unit price. See Inventory management for how to manage your warehouse and items.
- Expense: Any other type of cost, with an amount and notes. Use this for costs that don’t come from your inventory — for example, outsourced work or materials purchased on the spot.
You can add billables to a task from the task detail page, under the Add to task section.
Billables overview
Section titled “Billables overview”The billables page at Task management > Billables gives you a centralized view of all billables across your tasks. Use this page to:
- Review outstanding billables that have not yet been added to a bill
- Filter by boat, component, assignee, or whether the billable is already on a bill
- Quickly identify costs that still need to be invoiced
A bill groups billables from one or more tasks into a single document that you can use for invoicing. You can create and manage bills at Task management > Bills.
Creating a bill
Section titled “Creating a bill”To create a bill:
- Go to Task management > Bills and click Create.
- Give the bill a name (for example, the boat owner’s name or a reference number).
- Optionally add a description with additional context.
Adding expenses to a bill
Section titled “Adding expenses to a bill”Once a bill is created, you can add expenses to it. A bill can include any combination of:
- Inventory items used on tasks
- Labor recorded on tasks
- Miscellaneous costs recorded on tasks
Each expense can only appear on one bill at a time. This prevents accidentally invoicing the same cost twice.
Bill summary
Section titled “Bill summary”A bill automatically calculates:
- Item costs: Total value of inventory items on the bill
- Miscellaneous costs: Total of expense entries on the bill
- Total cost: Combined item and miscellaneous costs
- Total labor: Combined duration of all labor entries on the bill
Archiving bills
Section titled “Archiving bills”Bills can be archived once they have been processed. Archived bills are hidden from the default list but can still be accessed by applying the archive filter.
Export a bill as PDF
Section titled “Export a bill as PDF”Open a bill, click the 3-dot menu, and select Export as PDF.
Cost reporting
Section titled “Cost reporting”Floatist provides several reports to help you understand where your money is going:
- Cost per boat at Reports > Cost per boat: See total maintenance costs broken down by boat.
- Cost per category at Reports > Cost per category: Understand spending by task category — for example, how much you spent on electrical repairs versus engine maintenance.
- Logged hours at Reports > Logged hours: Review labor hours logged by technician and boat.
- Component hours at Reports > Component hours: Track running hours on boat components like engines and generators.
All reports support date range filtering, so you can analyze costs for a specific period.