On a fixed-price job, the payment schedule is set upfront and you invoice against milestones — the whole route is mapped before the trip starts. Cost-plus runs more like a meter: you track what you’re actually spending as the job unfolds, then bill the client for those costs — plus your markup — as you go.

Eano supports this workflow. The short version is: log expenses throughout the job, then pull them into invoices when it’s time to bill. Here’s how it fits together.

The foundation of cost-plus billing is good expense tracking. Every material purchase, labor cost, or subcontractor payment you log becomes something you can bill against later.

You have a few ways to get expenses into Eano:

Manually, from the field or the office: Head to the Finance tab of your project, open the Expenses sub-tab, and hit + Add Expense. Fill in the vendor, amount, category, and date. If you’ve got a receipt, upload it — Eano will read the amount and date off it automatically.

From your phone: Field workers can tap the camera button in the bottom-right corner of the Projects screen, choose New Expense, and snap a photo of a receipt on the spot. It goes straight into the project’s expense log.

From QuickBooks: If you’re connected to QuickBooks, you can sync your QB expenses directly into Eano. Purchases you’ve already recorded in QuickBooks show up in the project without re-entry.

The more consistently you log expenses as they happen, the easier billing becomes — you won’t be reconstructing costs from memory at invoice time.

When you’re ready to send a bill, go to the Finance tab and create a new invoice. As you add line items, you can pull in the expenses you’ve logged: start typing in the description field, and Eano suggests matching expenses from what’s on record for the project. Each suggestion shows the amount, vendor, and date so you can pick the right one. Select an expense and it becomes a line item on the invoice, with the description and amount filled in and linked back to the original expense.

From there, you can add your markup, adjust any amounts, and add any additional line items that aren’t tied to logged expenses (a management fee, for example, or a line for labor calculated separately).

Once the invoice looks right, finalize it and send it to the client. They’ll receive it the same way they’d receive a milestone invoice — via email and SMS, with a link to pay online if you’ve got Stripe connected.

The Finance tab summary shows your estimated expenses against your actual expenses in real time, so you always know how the job is tracking. As costs come in and you log them, the actuals update — you don’t have to wait until invoicing to see where your margin is.

We’re actively building new features to make cost-plus invoicing smoother — including better tools for applying markup to groups of expenses before billing. More on that soon.