How does ExpenseBot work for consultants?

Two different consultants ask this. Both are covered below.

1. You're an independent consultant tracking your own costs

Your problem isn't "where did my money go" — it's which client a cost belongs to, and which costs you invoice back. Consulting spend splits three ways and most tools only model the third:

• Re-billable — client-site travel, accommodation, direct project costs
• Absorbed — business development, proposals, pitches that didn't land
• Overhead — indemnity insurance, memberships, your own software

Two failures follow from not separating them: re-billable costs that never reach an invoice, and engagements that look profitable until travel is counted.

How to work it:

1. Tag each cost to its engagement. Create tags under Expense Tags using a recognised prefix — Client – Acme, Project – Website Redesign (en-dash, space each side). Assign from the Tag column in your sheet, when photographing a receipt, or by writing tag:Acme on the receipt. The AI suggests tags overnight by grouping related spending, but it can't know which client a cost was for — that judgement is yours.
2. Let Gmail capture the travel. Flights, hotels, rail and parking arrive as confirmation emails, not paper. Connecting Gmail reads them into a Google Sheet you own on a nightly scan.
3. Ask for the P&L. Tag income with the same client prefix, then ask the chat for per-tag P&L or profit by client — you get income, expenses, net profit and margin per engagement, ranked. Add "vs last quarter" for the change.

Where it stops: ExpenseBot is not an invoicing suite. It gives you the tagged, evidenced list of what to re-bill; the invoice goes out of whatever you already use. It reports what has already been recorded — it does not forecast or budget.

➡️ If your question is about the invoice itself — how to bill expenses back to a client, what a reimbursable-expense invoice should contain, or whether to charge GST/HST/VAT on rebilled costs — that is a different job: see Bill a Client for Expenses and Reimbursable Expense Invoice. This entry covers getting the costs tagged and evidenced before the invoice.

Commonly missed: professional indemnity insurance, memberships and accreditation, subcontractor payments (which may create a reporting obligation depending on amount and country), research and data subscriptions, coworking day passes near client sites.

2. You're a consultant deploying ExpenseBot to a client

• Fast to stand up — Google sign-in, no IT involvement, no ERP integration project
• The client owns their data — everything lives in a Google Sheet in their Drive, so the engagement doesn't create a dependency on you or on us
• Exports to what they already run — QuickBooks Online, Xero, Sage; their accountant uses ExpenseBot free
• Self-manageable after handover — categories, tags and capture rules are theirs to change

Full guide: Consultant Expense Tracker · reporting side: Profit by Client · invoicing side: Bill a Client for Expenses. Estimates — confirm with your tax professional.