Vendors and categories

Available on the Business and Team plans.

Two small lists make your expense data dramatically more useful: Vendors (who you pay) and Categories (what it was for). Both live as tabs on the Expenses page, and both are worth ten minutes of setup because everything downstream leans on them.

Vendors

Each vendor has a Name, an optional Default category, and Notes — account numbers, contact details, payment terms, the name of the person who actually answers the phone.

The default category is the time-saver. Pick "Home Depot" on an expense and the category fills in as "Materials" automatically. Set defaults on your ten most-used vendors and the large majority of your expenses categorise themselves, which matters because the categorising is the step people skip when they are in a hurry.

Deleting a vendor keeps its historical expenses — they simply lose the vendor label rather than vanishing from your books.

Categories

Categories are your expense taxonomy: Materials, Fuel, Insurance, Subcontractors, Office. Each has a Name and a Colour that shows as a chip in the expense table, which is what makes a long list scannable rather than a wall of text.

Keep the list short and meaningful. Eight to twelve categories that match how you actually think about the business — or how your accountant does — beats forty hyper-specific ones. The failure mode of a long list is not clutter, it is inconsistency: when there are three plausible categories for a receipt, the same kind of cost lands in different places on different days, and every report built on it becomes untrustworthy.

If you are unsure how granular to go, a good test is whether you would ever act differently based on the split. "Fuel" and "Vehicle maintenance" are worth separating because they behave differently. "Screws" and "Nails" are not.

You can retire a category by deactivating it; its past expenses keep their history and their colour.

The Maintenance category: when you record an asset maintenance log as an expense, Velosiq files it under a "Maintenance" category automatically, creating it the first time if it does not exist. That is expected — it keeps equipment upkeep cleanly separated so it can be counted against the machine in asset ROI rather than disappearing into general costs.

Why it pays off

Every filter and report downstream leans on these two lists. The expense table filters by vendor and by category. Profit and loss is only as insightful as your categorisation is consistent — a P&L built on scattered categories will technically be correct and practically useless.

The payoff is not really at tax time either, though it helps there. It is the moment you notice that one category has quietly grown 40% year on year, which is not a thing you can see at all when the underlying data is inconsistent.