Plant and equipment hire is the easy half of this problem — it comes with an invoice, a start date and an end date, and it's obvious which job it belongs to. The harder half is everything else: the blades, discs and drill bits that wear out doing the job, and the tool that goes missing or breaks partway through one. None of it invoices itself, so most of it never gets tagged to a job at all.

Three different kinds of tool cost

  • Hired equipment — day-rate plant, scaffolding, generators. Easy to tag, because it comes with its own invoice per job.
  • Consumables — blades, discs, drill bits, sanding paper. Cheap individually, constant across every job, and almost never logged against the specific one that used them up.
  • Owned tool wear and replacement — a drill that finally dies, a saw blade that snaps mid-cut on a particularly awkward job. A real cost, but one that's easy to write off as "just tools" rather than attributing it to anything specific.

Why hired equipment is the easy part

Hired plant already behaves like any other job cost — there's an invoice, a job it was hired for, and a natural moment to tag it. The main mistake here is timing rather than tracking: hire that runs longer than planned because it wasn't returned promptly, or a piece of kit still on the meter after the job's effectively finished, quietly adds cost to a job that's already been priced and is sitting there accumulating hire charges nobody's watching.

Consumables: small individually, real in aggregate

A single blade or box of screws barely moves a job's total. Across a year of jobs, consumables are often a genuinely significant cost that virtually nobody tracks at the job level — they get bought in a batch, thrown in the van, and used across whatever job happens to need them next, with no record of which job actually consumed what. The fix isn't perfect precision on every single item; it's tagging the batch purchase to whichever job it was mainly bought for, so the cost at least lands somewhere real instead of disappearing into a general "tools" category nobody ever reviews.

When a tool breaks mid-job

A blade that snaps on an unusually tough cut, or a tool that fails specifically because of what a job demanded of it, is arguably a cost that job should carry — it's directly attributable, unlike general wear spread across a year of ordinary use. Logging the replacement cost against the job it happened on, rather than absorbing it as a vague business overhead, gives a more honest picture of what that particular job actually took to complete.

A worked example

Say a job involves cutting an unusually large volume of tile, and two diamond blades are used up in the process instead of the one a typical job needs. Logged against that job, the extra blade cost is a small but real signal that tile-heavy jobs like this one carry a consumables cost worth building into future quotes. Left untracked, it's just an unexplained gap between what tools cost across the year and what any individual job seemed to need.

How Site Wallet handles this

Hired equipment invoices, consumable purchases and tool replacement costs can all be logged and tagged to a job the same way any other receipt is — so a job's true cost includes what it took in tools and gear, not just materials and labour. Over time, that makes it possible to see which types of job genuinely carry a higher tool cost, instead of that cost sitting invisibly inside general overheads.

FAQ

Is it worth tracking every single consumable individually?

Not item by item — tagging a batch purchase of consumables to the job it was mainly bought for is enough to get the cost into the right place without turning every box of screws into an admin task.

Should I track wear on tools I use on every job, not just one?

General wear-and-tear on everyday tools is more of a business overhead than a per-job cost — the job-level tracking matters most for hire, consumables genuinely tied to one job, and breakages directly caused by a specific job's demands.

Does hired equipment running over its planned period need separate tracking?

Yes — it's worth flagging as soon as it's noticed, the same way any other cost overrun would be, since hire that quietly continues after a job's effectively finished is one of the easier costs to catch early and stop.