You finish a bathroom remodel. The homeowner pays. You feel good about it — until you're sitting with your accountant in February and you realize you never tracked the $340 in tile adhesive, the extra $90 of caulk, the two trips to the hardware store that each had a receipt you shoved in the truck's cupholder.
That job was profitable on paper. On paper.
This is the expense tracking problem that nobody talks about because it's boring — but it quietly eats 3, 5, sometimes 8 points of margin on a job if you're not disciplined about it.
Why Solo GCs Are the Worst at This (And It's Not Their Fault)
Big remodeling companies have office staff. Someone whose entire job is to collect receipts, categorize them, and reconcile them against each project. Solo GCs have themselves — and they're also doing the demo, the tile work, the client calls, and the estimates.
So the receipts pile up. Some make it into a folder. Some get photographed with a phone and live in a camera roll of 4,000 photos. Some just disappear. By the time you're invoicing the job, you're guessing at material costs and hoping it still pencils out.
The expensive contractor CRMs have expense tracking features. But most of them are built around the assumption that you've got a bookkeeper entering data, or at least 30 minutes of quiet time at a desk. That's not the reality of running a one-person residential operation.
What Actually Works: Snap It Before You Leave the Store
The only expense workflow that sticks for solo GCs is one that takes less time than putting the receipt in your pocket.
That means your phone. That means AI that can read the receipt and pull out the vendor, the amount, and the date without you typing anything. That means the expense is attached to the right job before you start the truck.
Chisel's AI receipt OCR does exactly this. You take a photo of a receipt — crumpled, slightly blurry, hardware store thermal paper that fades in a week — and Chisel reads it and logs it. Vendor, amount, date. Two taps to confirm and attach it to the open job. Done before you hit the highway.
No shoebox. No camera roll archaeology in February. No guessing.
The Margin Math Is Simple
Say you run 20 jobs a year. Average job is $8,000. If untracked expenses are eating 5% of your revenue, you're leaving $8,000 on the table annually — that's an entire job you worked for free.
Even if it's only 2%, that's $3,200 that should be in your pocket. It's not because the receipts didn't make it into a system.
What This Looks Like at Tax Time
When it's time to hand things off to your accountant (or do your own filing), every expense is already categorized by job inside Chisel. If you're using QuickBooks, you can export it directly. No reconstruction. No digging through bank statements trying to remember what "HD SUPPLY #4471" was for.
Your accountant charges by the hour. A clean set of categorized expenses by job is the kind of thing that cuts that bill in half.
The Wedge
Chisel is $29 a month. Flat. No per-user fees, no tiers, no upsell to get the features that should've been included. The bigger tools — built for GCs with crews of 10 — charge multiples of that and still make you jump through hoops for basic expense tracking.
You don't need crew scheduling. You don't need multi-foreman dispatch. You need to run your jobs cleanly, know your actual margins, and not spend your Sundays doing paperwork.
That's what Chisel is built for.
14 days free. No credit card required to start.
Get started at getchisel.app/register
