TRADIE EXPENSES YOU'RE FORGETTING TO TRACK (AND HOW THEY KILL YOUR PROFIT)
You finished a bathroom reno last week. Invoiced $6,500. Materials cost you $2,200. That's $4,300 profit, right?
Not even close.
Most sole traders only track the obvious expenses — materials and maybe fuel. But there are dozens of hidden costs chewing through your profit every single week. Individually they seem small. Added up over a year, they can be the difference between a healthy business and one that's barely paying you minimum wage.
THE EXPENSES MOST TRADIES MISS
1. VEHICLE COSTS (NOT JUST FUEL)
Everyone tracks fuel. Almost nobody tracks the full cost of running their vehicle for work. Your ute or van costs far more than what goes in the tank:
- Registration — $700-$1,200/year depending on your state and vehicle
- Insurance — $1,200-$2,500/year for a trade vehicle
- Servicing and repairs — $1,500-$3,000/year on a working vehicle
- Tyres — $800-$1,600 every 40,000-60,000km
- Depreciation — your $55K ute loses $8,000-$10,000 in value per year
If you drive 30,000km a year for work, the ATO logbook rate is 88 cents per km — that's $26,400 worth of vehicle expenses. Are you tracking anywhere near that?
2. INSURANCE
Public liability insurance alone runs $800-$2,000/year for most trades. Add income protection, tool insurance, and workers comp (if you have employees), and you could be looking at $3,000-$5,000/year in insurance costs. That's roughly $20 per working day before you even pick up a tool.
3. PHONE AND INTERNET
Your phone is your office. You use it to quote, call suppliers, message clients, navigate to jobs, and send invoices. If your plan costs $65/month and you use it 80% for work, that's $624/year in deductible expenses you're probably not claiming.
4. TOOLS AND EQUIPMENT
That new angle grinder. Replacement drill bits. A set of chisels. Safety harness. Most tradies buy tools throughout the year and never add up the total. Items under $300 can be claimed immediately. Bigger items get depreciated. Either way, they're eating into your profit and need to be tracked.
5. PPE AND WORK CLOTHING
Steel caps, hi-vis, safety glasses, gloves, hard hats, sun protection — it all costs money. A decent pair of work boots is $180-$250 and might last 6-12 months on a building site. Work clothing with your business logo is also fully deductible.
6. TRAINING AND LICENCES
White card renewal. Working at heights. First aid. Trade licence fees. Any course that maintains or improves your skills for your current work is deductible. These can easily run $500-$1,500/year.
7. ACCOUNTANT AND TAX AGENT FEES
If you're paying an accountant $800-$1,500 to do your tax return and BAS, that's a business expense. Most tradies pay it and forget to track it as an expense against their jobs.
8. BANK FEES AND MERCHANT FEES
Monthly account fees. Transaction fees on your business account. If you use a card reader or payment platform like Square, those 1.6% transaction fees add up fast. On $150,000 in annual revenue, that's $2,400/year in payment processing fees alone.
9. SOFTWARE AND SUBSCRIPTIONS
Accounting software. Invoicing apps. Cloud storage. Project management tools. Even Spotify for the job site (if you can justify it). Most tradies are paying $50-$150/month across various subscriptions and never account for it.
10. HOME OFFICE
If you do admin, quoting, or invoicing from home — and most sole traders do — you can claim a portion of your home expenses. The ATO's fixed rate method gives you 67 cents per hour for home office use. If you spend 5 hours a week on admin at home, that's $1,742/year you're leaving on the table.
WHAT THIS ACTUALLY LOOKS LIKE
Let's add up a realistic year for a sole trader sparky earning $150,000 in revenue:
ANNUAL HIDDEN EXPENSES — SOLE TRADER ELECTRICIAN
That's $32,132 per year in expenses that most tradies never properly track against their jobs. On top of whatever materials you're buying for each project.
Put another way: these hidden expenses cost you roughly $134 per working day. So every morning, you need to earn $134 before you even start making money.
WHY THIS MATTERS FOR YOUR HOURLY RATE
If you're charging $85/hr and working 7 billable hours a day, you're invoicing $595. Subtract the $134 in daily hidden expenses and your real take-home is $461 — meaning your actual hourly rate is $65.86, not $85.
That's a 22% pay cut you didn't know you were taking.
And that's before materials on individual jobs. The real number is often lower.
HOW TO FIX IT
The fix isn't complicated. You just need to actually track everything. The problem is most people try spreadsheets, forget after two weeks, and go back to guessing.
TheBrickBook was built to solve exactly this. Every expense category listed above can be logged in seconds from your phone — on the job site, at the servo, or in the driveway at the end of the day. It automatically calculates your real hourly rate per job so you can see which work is actually profitable.
TRACK EVERY DOLLAR. KNOW YOUR REAL PROFIT.
TheBrickBook makes expense tracking dead simple — even at 6am on a job site.
Download Free for iOSTHE BOTTOM LINE
The expenses you forget to track are the ones that hurt the most — because you never see them coming. Individually, a $65 phone bill or a $180 pair of boots doesn't feel like much. But when you add up every hidden cost across a full year, it's often $25,000-$40,000 you weren't accounting for.
Track everything. Know your real numbers. Then price your work accordingly.