Not every dollar you spend belongs to a job. Your contractor’s license, your software subscriptions, the rent on the office, the truck insurance — those costs show up whether you run five jobs this month or fifty. They’re the cost of having a business at all.

Eano has a bucket built for exactly those costs: OpEx, short for operating expenses. It keeps overhead out of your job numbers, where it would quietly distort them, and puts it somewhere it can still be counted.

When you add an expense from the Finance tab, the project dropdown has an option pinned at the very top: OpEx (Operating Expenses). Choose it instead of a project, and the expense gets filed as a business overhead cost rather than a job cost.

Once those costs are in, your Profit and Loss report can tell you what you’re actually making after overhead, not just what you’re making on the work itself.

Start from the Finance tab — the main one in the left sidebar, not the Finance tab inside a specific project. (Expenses created inside a project are always job costs, so the OpEx option doesn’t appear there. More on that below.)

One difference you’ll notice: once you choose OpEx, the options for connecting the expense to a scope item, a subcontract or work order, and a client invoice go away. That’s on purpose. Those connections only mean something for expenses tied to a job, and an operating expense isn’t tied to one.

Operating expenses sit in the same expense list as everything else, but they’re easy to pick out: a yellow OpEx chip rides along next to the description.

Scroll across to the project column and you’ll see the same chip there, reading OpEx (Operating Expenses) in place of the project name and address a job cost would show.

That carries through to your Excel export too: exported OpEx rows read “OpEx” in the project name and address columns rather than sitting there blank.

The Profit and Loss report on your Finance tab overview is where operating expenses earn their keep. Three of its columns work together to tell you the fuller story:

Gross Margin — your gross profit as a percentage of income. This is job-level performance: how the work itself did, before overhead enters the picture.

Operating Income — your gross profit minus your operating expenses. This is the number that answers “did the business make money,” as opposed to “did the work make money.”

Operating Margin — operating income as a percentage of income.

Here’s why that distinction earns its keep. Say you spent $1,000 on materials for a job and collected $2,000 from the client. That’s a $1,000 gross profit and it looks great. But if you also spent $10,000 running the business over the same stretch and only ran five jobs, each one has to carry $2,000 of overhead. Suddenly that job lost money. Gross margin was never going to tell you that. Operating margin will.

Two things to keep in mind when you read those columns:

Only paid expenses count. An OpEx expense that’s still open doesn’t get included — same rule the rest of the P&L already follows. If your operating income looks higher than you expected, check whether some overhead is still sitting unpaid.

The operating columns only fill in on the bottom row. That’s the All projects row, the company-wide total. If you’ve added rows for a specific project or a set of tags, Operating Income and Operating Margin stay blank on those. Overhead isn’t attached to any one job, so there’s no honest way to split it across them — and a made-up split would be worse than no number at all.

It’s a Finance tab thing. The OpEx option only shows up when you’re creating an expense with no project already in play. Add an expense from inside a project and Eano files it against that project.

It works on expenses you enter yourself. Expenses that came in from QuickBooks, and labor costs generated from timesheets, can’t be reassigned to OpEx — their project assignment comes from where they originated. If you have overhead sitting in QuickBooks that you want reflected here, log it as an OpEx expense in Eano directly.

You’re not locked in. If you file something as OpEx and later realize it belonged to a job, open the expense and switch the Project field to the real project. It works in the other direction too.

There’s no separate OpEx page. Operating expenses live in the same expense list as everything else, marked with the badge. The place they get pulled out and totaled on their own is the Profit and Loss report.

I went to create a new invoice and there was no OpEx option in the Project field. Where is it?

OpEx lives on the expense side only — it shows up in the Project dropdown when you’re adding or editing an expense, not when you’re creating an invoice. That’s deliberate: an invoice is money coming in from a client, and overhead isn’t something you bill a client for. To log overhead, go to the Finance tab, open Expenses, and add the expense there — OpEx will be pinned at the top of the Project list.

What counts as an operating expense?

Anything you’d still be paying for if all your jobs paused tomorrow. Licensing and permit fees for the business itself, insurance, software subscriptions, office rent, accounting and legal, marketing, vehicle costs that aren’t billed to a job. The rule of thumb: if you can’t point at a specific job it belongs to, it’s probably OpEx.

Why can’t I connect an OpEx expense to a scope item or a subcontract?

Because those connections describe work on a job, and an operating expense isn’t on a job. If you find yourself wanting to link one, that’s usually a sign the expense actually belongs to a project — switch the Project field over and the connection options come back.

Do OpEx expenses affect a project’s profitability?

Not individually, no. They’re deliberately kept out of COGS and out of any project or tag row, so no single job gets charged for them. They show up in the company-wide Operating Income and Operating Margin, which is where overhead genuinely belongs.

I marked something as OpEx but the P&L didn’t move.

Two likely reasons. Either the expense isn’t marked as paid yet, or its paid date falls outside the date range selected at the top of the report. Check both.

Can I see just my operating expenses?

The expense list doesn’t have an OpEx filter — the badge is how you pick them out visually. The Profit and Loss report is where they get totaled up as a group.

Can I add an OpEx expense from the mobile app?

Operating expenses are added from Eano on the web.