Checking your work
Costs
Job costing with no extra bookkeeping. Every figure comes from invoices you had to record to file RCT, and from what Revenue authorised.
On this page
Where the numbers come from
Costs shows what each project has cost, broken down by subcontractors and suppliers, plus what has been withheld for Revenue and paid out.
Nothing here asks you to enter anything new. That constraint is the point: a costing feature with its own data entry becomes a second set of books that falls behind within a month. These figures are a byproduct of work you had to do anyway.
- Void invoices are excluded. Everything else counts, including drafts — the work was done and the obligation exists whether or not you have approved paying it. Excluding drafts would show you a cost lower than your actual commitments, which is the worse direction to be wrong in.
- Invoices with no project group under “Unassigned” rather than disappearing. A total that quietly omits work is worse than one that admits it does not know where the work belongs.
Everything excludes VAT
VAT you can reclaim is not a cost. It flows through the business rather than out of it, and counting it would overstate every project by up to 23% — enough to make a profitable job look like a loss.
Under the reverse charge, a subcontractor invoice carries no VAT at all, so the invoice total and the cost are the same figure. For suppliers on standard VAT they differ. Both are handled; the VAT recorded on invoices is shown separately so the number is accounted for rather than unexplained.
Two meanings of gross and net
This is the trap in the whole area, and it is worth thirty seconds because getting it wrong misstates the cost of a job.
They are unrelated axes. An invoice can be gross of VAT and simultaneously be the gross an RCT deduction is calculated on. Your cost is €4,250 — the RCT deduction is the subcontractor’s tax that you collected on Revenue’s behalf, not a reduction in what the work cost you.
Which is why the split is shown
Costs shows the total cost, the amount withheld, and the amount paid out as three separate figures. Adding the withheld amount to the paid amount gives you the cost; neither one alone is it.
The effective rate
The overall rate actually applied across your authorised deductions. Reported rather than assumed — a builder whose subcontractors are mostly at 0% with one at 35% has an effective rate that is neither, and seeing it is usually how the 35% one gets noticed.
Before anything is filed there is no effective rate, and none is shown. A zero there would read as “everyone is at 0%”, which is a much more comfortable claim than “nothing has been filed”.
What is deliberately missing
There is no budget column, no variance and no forecast. There is nothing to compare actual cost against until budgets can be imported, and an empty budget column invites someone to read a comparison that is not being made.
What is here is actual cost, sourced from filings and invoices, and correct. That is a smaller claim than most costing tools make, and it is one that holds.