Recorded expenses

DashPilot records the operating costs a driver enters, so a period's gross earnings can be read beside what the work cost. Every figure in this page is built out of records the driver typed, and nothing else.

Every amount and note in this documentation is synthetic.

What an expense is

Four facts, all entered by the driver:

Fact	Required	Notes
Amount	Yes	Decimal, never negative. A recorded $0.00 is allowed and means the driver recorded that this cost nothing.
Date and time	Yes	When the cost was incurred, not when it was typed.
Category	Yes	One of five: fuel, parking and tolls, maintenance, supplies, other.
Note	No	A short reminder, up to 120 characters.

What DashPilot does not do

It observes no purchase. There is no card, bank, receipt, email or delivery-platform connection anywhere in the app, and no network access at all.

It estimates nothing, and nothing estimated becomes an expense. A cost that was not entered does not exist here. DashPilot can estimate a completed shift's fuel from its recorded mileage and two figures the driver assumes, but that estimate is a separate thing in a separate place: it creates no expense, changes no expense, and is never added to or netted against any total on this page. See Estimated fuel and net, and the section below on the overlap the app states rather than resolves. There is still no cost per mile, no vehicle wear and no depreciation.

There are no tax features. No deduction, no mileage allowance, no classification of a cost as claimable, and no figure in the app is a tax figure. The categories are a driver's own labels and deliberately do not resemble a tax form.

An expense belongs to a date, not to a shift

This is the substantive decision behind the whole feature.

An expense carries the moment it happened and has no relationship to a shift or a delivery. A period contains an expense if that moment falls inside the period, by exactly the rule that puts a shift in a period.

The reasons are the facts of the work:

• A tank of fuel is burned across several shifts and several days.
• A set of tyres is spread over thousands of miles and hundreds of deliveries.
• A parking charge might belong to one delivery, but the driver did not say which one and the app cannot know.

Attaching a cost to whichever shift happened to be running when it was typed would record an attribution the driver never made, and no later screen or export could tell it apart from one they did. That is the same failure DashPilot refuses when it declines to divide a shift's earnings among its deliveries.

Two consequences follow, and both are deliberate:

• No recorded cost is attached to a shift or a delivery, so no recorded net figure exists at shift level. Net after recorded expenses is a period figure and stays one.
• There is no cost per hour, per mile or per delivery. The numerator would come from records dated to a period and the denominator from work recorded on shifts, which is the numerator-from-one-population figure this project refuses to publish everywhere else.

A completed shift does show an estimated net after fuel, and that is not a counter-example: its subtrahend is derived from that shift's own recorded mileage and its own recorded assumptions, not from any expense the driver entered. See Estimated fuel and net.

A recorded fuel cost and an estimated one can describe the same money

A driver who records the fill-up that paid for a shift's miles now has two figures about overlapping money, in two places: this recorded expense, dated to a day, and that shift's estimated fuel cost.

DashPilot states the overlap rather than resolving it. It does not know which shifts a tank of fuel was burned on, so any automatic matching would be an attribution the driver never made, which is the same refusal behind an expense having no shift at all. The two are kept apart everywhere: neither is derived from the other, nothing adds them together, and no figure in the app nets one against the other. Reading both is reading two different things, and the screens say which is which.

At period scope the two now appear on one screen, which is where a reader is most likely to add them by accident. They are in two sections, each labelled for what it is, and the period carries two net figures rather than one combined one:

• Net after recorded expenses is recorded gross earnings less the costs entered here.
• Estimated net after fuel is recorded earnings less an estimate, over the shifts that record both halves.

Nothing subtracts both, because subtracting both under one label would count the same fuel twice. The footer under the estimate says so. See Estimated fuel and net.

Categories

Five, and no more:

Category	What it holds
Fuel	Fuel or charging.
Parking and tolls	The cost of getting the vehicle to and through the work.
Maintenance	Servicing, tyres, repairs, a wash.
Supplies	Bags, mounts, cables and the like.
Other	Everything else. Claims nothing about what the money was for.

The set is closed on purpose. Custom categories would need naming, normalisation, renaming and merging, the apparatus that pickup identity needs, and would turn a four-tap record into a filing exercise.

A stored category a build cannot recognise reads as other. That is reachable only by running an older build against a store a newer one wrote; the amount, the date and the note are still the driver's records, and losing the row to an unknown label would be the worse failure.

Recorded expenses in a period summary

The period summary reports what was recorded and what it comes to, with the number of records behind it:

$48.60 recorded
Across 2 recorded expenses

Fuel                 $42.10
Parking and tolls     $6.50

A recorded total is not the period's costs. DashPilot holds the rows the driver typed and nothing else, so the total is a floor in exactly the way recorded mileage is a floor on the miles driven.

There is no coverage pair on an expense total, and its absence is deliberate. A coverage pair needs a denominator, the records that could have contributed, and expenses have none: nothing on the device knows how many costs a driver incurred and did not enter. Writing "3 of 3 expenses" would state a completeness the app cannot observe. A count of what was entered is the whole of what can honestly be said.

A category with nothing recorded in it is left out, never listed at $0.00. A driver who has never entered a maintenance cost has not recorded that maintenance was free.

Net after recorded expenses

Net after recorded expenses                                  $37.65
Recorded gross earnings across 1 of 2 shifts, less 2 recorded expenses.
Both halves are what you recorded: shifts with no amount are not counted, and
costs you did not enter are not subtracted. This is not profit, and it is not a
tax figure.

The figure is the difference between two subtotals of things the driver typed:

• gross earnings recorded on the period's completed shifts, over the shifts that carry an amount, and
• the expenses recorded in the period, over the records that exist.

It is called net after recorded expenses, in full, everywhere it appears. It is never shortened to "net", and never called profit, take-home pay, earnings after costs or a taxable amount. Both halves are floors, so their difference is an upper bound on what the period actually netted.

The figure may be negative. A period whose recorded costs exceed its recorded earnings is a fact, not an error.

When there is no net figure

The amount is absent unless both halves were recorded, and each refusal has a reason:

State	What is shown	Why
No expense recorded	No figure, and a sentence saying nothing was recorded to subtract	The difference would equal the gross exactly, and showing that as a net would assert the period cost nothing
No shift amount recorded	No figure, and a sentence saying there are no recorded earnings	A "net" of nothing minus recorded costs is a negative number, which beside a period's work reads as a loss the records do not establish

A driver who genuinely spent nothing can record $0.00, which is a recorded expense and does produce a net.

The gross figures do not move

Recording an expense changes nothing about gross earnings, the three gross rates, recorded mileage or any other existing figure. The net is a new figure beside them, never a redefinition of one, and the word gross stays on every figure that is gross.

A day with costs and no work

A driver can buy fuel on a day they did not drive. Such a day still shows

No completed shifts recorded on this day.

and, below it, the expenses recorded on it. The record is not hidden behind a sentence about shifts, and the day can be exported.

Recording and correcting

Expenses live on their own screen, reached from the Expenses button in the main screen's navigation bar. It is in the bar rather than in the list because an expense belongs to no shift, so there is no section of that screen it is part of, and because every row added above the shift history pushes the list a driver opens the app to read further down. There is no expense control on a shift, and none inside a delivery.

• Adding is a draft. Nothing is written until Save; Cancel writes nothing.
• Editing replaces every fact at once, so a refused edit leaves the record exactly as it was.
• Deleting removes only that record. Nothing else in the app changes, and deleting a shift never deletes an expense: the two are unrelated rows.
• A date cannot be in the future. An expense is something that already happened, and a mistyped year would silently drop the record out of every period the driver looks at. The bound is re-read when the app returns to the foreground, so an editor left open across a midnight does not refuse the day that has begun; the date already chosen is never rewritten.
• A negative amount is refused by the model, not only by the screen.

Typing an amount and a note is a stopped-vehicle task. Nothing in the expense flow is presented during a shift's driving controls or during a delivery.

Export

JSON carries expenses. A day, week, month, range or all-history export includes every expense dated inside it, with its note, plus the period's recorded expense total by category and the net after it.

A single shift's export carries none, because no expense belongs to a shift. Export a period to see costs alongside work.

CSV carries none either. Its rows are deliveries, and an expense belongs to a date rather than to a delivery, so it has no row in that table, and DashPilot will not invent one. The format picker says so before the file is written.

The export format version did not change: the additions are new keys beside the existing ones, no field was removed, renamed or redefined, and a reader that ignores unknown keys is unaffected. See History export.

Privacy

An expense is as sensitive as the rest of a driver's history, and a note is free text they typed.

• Nothing is logged but the category of a change and whether a note exists. Never the amount, never the date money was spent, and never a word of a note.
• Expenses stay on the device. They leave only through an export the driver started and shared.
• Nothing is uploaded, and there is no network access anywhere in DashPilot.

Limitations

• No recurring expenses, no templates and no reminders.
• No receipts, photographs or attachments.
• No merchant, payment method or vehicle on a record.
• No cost per mile, per hour or per delivery, by decision rather than by omission.
• No shift-level or delivery-level net figure built from recorded costs. A shift's estimated net after fuel is derived from that shift's own mileage and assumptions and subtracts no expense: see Estimated fuel and net.
• No reconciliation between a recorded fuel expense and an estimated fuel cost, deliberately.
• No expenses in the CSV export, and no separate expense export.
• No import, so an expense recorded elsewhere cannot be brought in.
• No tax anything, at all.