Introducing Expense Tracking: Snap a Receipt, Rebill Your Client in One Click

Where billable expenses actually go to die

Most freelancers don't lose billable expenses because they're careless. They lose them because expense tracking and invoicing live in two different tools with two different mental models. You book a $340 flight for a client kickoff, forward yourself the receipt, and tell yourself you'll add it to the invoice later. Three weeks later, when you're actually building that invoice, "later" has quietly turned into "wait, what flight?"

The fix isn't a better memory or a stricter habit. It's closing the gap between the two systems entirely. That's what expense tracking in Zenaris does — it isn't a separate receipts app bolted onto your invoicing tool. It's the same system.

What's new

You can now:

• Upload a receipt (photo or PDF) and log it against a category and a client — in one screen, right when the expense happens.
• Mark an expense billable or non-billable the moment you log it, not weeks later when you're trying to reconstruct what it was for.
• Pull billable expenses straight onto a draft invoice for that client as line items, in one click — no retyping amounts, no copy-pasting from a spreadsheet.
• Filter every expense by client, so an engagement's costs sit right next to the invoices they end up on.

That last point matters more than it sounds. An expense tagged "kickoff travel" for a specific client isn't just a number on an invoice anymore. It becomes part of the searchable history of that engagement — the same history your notes and tasks already live in.

Why this beats expenses bolted onto invoicing software

Plenty of invoicing tools let you log an expense and flag it billable — FreshBooks does this reasonably well, for example. But in most of those tools, an expense is a ledger entry that happens to have a "billable" checkbox. It doesn't connect to anything else about the client relationship. Ask six months later what you spent traveling for a specific project and you're filtering a transactions table, not asking a question.

In Zenaris, a billable expense is also a fact about the client. If you later search "what did I spend getting to the Meridian kickoff," that receipt comes back the same way a note or a task would. Expenses aren't a separate ledger sitting next to your business — they're part of the record of the work.

A quick walkthrough

Here's what logging a receipt actually looks like:

• Snap a photo of the receipt or forward the PDF — Zenaris reads the vendor, amount, and date, and suggests a category (travel, software, subcontractor, and so on).
• Confirm the category, attach it to a client and project, and toggle "billable" if you're passing the cost through.
• Keep working. The expense sits in that client's unbilled queue until you're ready.
• When you generate your next invoice for that client, an "Unbilled expenses" section lists every billable expense since the last invoice, ready to add with one click.

No spreadsheet reconciliation, and no "did I already bill this one" guesswork — once an expense is added to an invoice, it's marked billed and won't show up again.

Who this helps most

This is built for freelancers and consultants with real pass-through costs: travel to client sites, software licenses bought per-project, subcontractors brought in for a specific deliverable. If your only business expense is your own laptop, this won't change much for you. If you're routinely eating a few hundred dollars a month in client-related costs you forget to rebill, it shows up directly in what you collect.

Try it

Expense tracking is live now on every Zenaris plan, with attachment storage scaling by tier. Take a look at the Expenses feature, see how it pairs with invoicing, or check the full pricing breakdown if you're comparing plans.