You can track material and miscellaneous costs as job inputs rather than line items, which will not impact the price of the job or show up on the invoice. If you have flat rate services set up in your price book, you can also choose to automatically populate needed material for the service on the job.
What are Job Inputs?
If you'd like to track material and/or miscellaneous costs outside of line items you can do so by enabling the Material job inputs, and Miscellaneous job inputs settings from the job costing settings page. To get there, open up Account Settings, click on Job Details, and navigate to the Job Costing page. Once these settings are enabled, you'll see a job inputs section on the job details page on both web and mobile where materials and miscellaneous costs can be added. Items added to the job inputs card will not impact the job total or show up on the invoice.
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Material and miscellaneous inputs will be considered job costs in job costing reporting, and material inputs will be tracked as material used on the job in the material on jobs reports.
Automatically Track Material Inputs for Flat Rate Services
If you use flat rate pricing, you are likely considering the cost of the materials that will go into a service when setting the price. You don't want your customers to see the details of the material needed for the job, but you may want your employees to see what material they should use on a job, and you want to track what material was used along with the costs without impacting the price of the job.
If you have Flat Rate turned on, you'll notice a setting on any service that has material added to it in your price book called Track Material on jobs. Enabling this setting will auto-populate the material on the job as a material input when the service is added to a job. Material inputs will be visible from the web and mobile apps.
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βNote: The material job inputs setting will need to be enabled in order to see these materials on jobs. If the setting isn't enabled yet, you'll be prompted to turn it on when enabling this setting on a service.
Note that you can also enable/disable this setting for all flat rate services from the checkbox under the Material job inputs toggle on the job costing settings page
If you've set up flat rate pricing you'll also want to ensure you're tracking your service costs as expected costs on the job.