Search "expense tracker app" and you'll find a wall of personal budgeting apps built to categorise a coffee subscription. None of them are built for someone on a roof with a receipt going soft in the drizzle. Here's what actually matters for an Australian tradie choosing one.
What a tradie actually needs
Not a personal finance dashboard. A tool that answers one question fast: what has this job cost me so far, and where's the paperwork if the ATO asks? Everything else is secondary.
The must-have checklist
- Job tagging on every entry — every receipt and cash entry attached to a specific job, not just a category.
- Fast, accurate receipt scanning — AI that reads vendor, total, date and GST off a photo in seconds, faded thermal receipts included.
- Works one-handed, on-site — usable in work gloves, no signal required at the moment you snap it.
- Cash tracking alongside receipts — petty cash and cash payments to subbies in the same feed as card spending.
- GST-aware capture — GST amounts pulled out cleanly, ready to support your BAS input tax credits.
- BAS and tax-time-ready exports — PDF summaries, CSV for your bookkeeper, and a ZIP of every receipt photo.
- Records that survive a dropped phone — encrypted cloud storage, not just a camera roll.
Spreadsheets, general finance apps, and purpose-built apps
| Spreadsheet | General finance app | Site Wallet | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Job-level totals | Manual, if kept up | Rarely supported | Automatic, live |
| Receipt scanning | None | Basic, generic | AI trained on real trade receipts |
| Built for on-site use | No | No | Yes |
| GST-aware | Only if built by hand | Rarely | Yes |
| Bookkeeper-ready exports | Manual formatting | Limited | PDF, CSV, photo ZIP |
How Site Wallet stacks up
Every receipt is scanned by AI in seconds, tagged to a job in one tap, and rolled into a live running total for that job — GST captured along the way. Cash in and out sits alongside receipts in the same feed. When BAS or tax time rolls around, export a PDF summary, a CSV for your bookkeeper, or a ZIP of every receipt photo — no digging through the glovebox required.
Getting started in a day
Download the app, set up your first job, and start snapping receipts as they land. No chart of accounts, no setup wizard — the value comes from the habit: scan it the moment you get it, tag it to the job, let the totals build through the week.
FAQ
Do I need to be GST-registered to use an app like this?
No — job costing and expense tracking are useful whether or not you're GST-registered. It just becomes more important for capturing GST credits once you are.
Can a small crew all use it, not just the boss?
Yes — the whole point of job tagging is that everyone on the crew can log into the same job without duplicate entries or arguments about who spent what.
What if I lose my phone with all my receipts on it?
With cloud-backed storage, your receipt photos and extracted data live online, encrypted — not just on the device. A dropped phone in the site dam shouldn't mean lost records.