Costs and spending

Life Maintenance can quietly double as your home-and-vehicle accountant. Log what each task costs and we will roll it into per-item totals, per-category trends, and a tax-ready report when April rolls around.

The simplest way: log a cost when you mark something done

Every "Mark done" form has a Cost field. Enter what you paid (in whatever currency your account is set to) and save. That is it. We do the rolling up.

You can also log a cost after the fact from the schedule's history tab. Click the past completion, edit, fill in the cost, save.

What gets a cost field

Schedule completions.
Goal progress entries.
Supply purchases.
One-off events (you can convert any event into a cost record).
Receipts uploaded from a phone camera (we OCR them).

Where costs show up

| Where | What you see | | --- | --- | | Item detail page | Total spent on that item, over time. | | Person detail page | Total spent on or by that family member (Family only). | | Location detail page | Total spent at that property. | | Reports | Cost trend, by-category, tax-ready, year-end. | | Home page | A small monthly spending tile. |

Per-category breakdown

The By category report is the most popular. It shows where your maintenance dollars are actually going.

A typical breakdown might be:

36% Home (HVAC, roof, plumbing, landscaping)
28% Vehicles (cars, motorcycles, RV)
15% Pets (vet, food, grooming)
11% Appliances (repair, parts)
10% Other

Knowing this is half the battle for budgeting.

Receipts

Attach a photo of a receipt on the cost-log screen. We keep it linked to the schedule history. You can pull it up later from the schedule, the item, or the cost report.

Receipts feed into the Tax-ready report so you can produce itemized documentation without scanning a shoebox in April.

Budgets

On the Costs dashboard (linked from the Reports page), you can set monthly or annual budgets per category. We show a green-yellow-red bar against the budget and warn on the Home page if a category is on track to overshoot.

Budgets are optional. Many people just track and never set one.

Currency

Set your default currency under Settings → Preferences. We support USD, CAD, EUR, GBP, AUD, NZD, and most others.

If you have a second home in a different currency, you can override the currency per location. The reports will convert to your default at the time of the entry.

Family-plan accounting

On Family, every cost is tagged with who paid. That makes "how much did Marcus spend on the cars this quarter" easy to answer. It is also useful for shared-household accounting if you split big expenses unevenly.

Tax season

The Tax-ready report (under Reports) bundles maintenance spending for the year with:

Line items by date, item, and category.
Subtotals by category.
Receipt thumbnails (or links to the full image).
A printable cover page with totals.

Most tax preparers love it. Most of our customers send it directly to their accountant in February.

Privacy

Cost data, like everything else, respects item visibility. Personal items' costs do not appear on family-shared reports.