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Rent, utilities and subscriptions

Studio rent, electricity, the design software you pay for monthly, the accountant, postage: money that leaves the workshop and buys no goods. It is recorded under Purchases → Services.

These are the same supplier papers as everything else — same supplier, same VAT, same part payments, same receipt attached — with one difference: nothing lands on a shelf, so the payment carries a category instead of material lines.

Service payments, with the expected ones listed above the recorded history

Recording a payment​

Add payment asks for the date, the supplier, the amount, the category and, optionally, the receipt. Categories come ready-made — Rent, Utilities, Subscriptions, Postage and shipping, Bank fees, Marketing, Accounting, Other services — and you can rename or add to them.

Like a goods receipt, a service payment is a draft until you post it, and posting is what accepts it into the books and into the Profit report.

Payments that repeat​

Rent falls due every month whether or not anyone enters it. A recurring payment says so:

  • A name, a supplier, a category and the amount it usually costs
  • A period - monthly, quarterly or yearly
  • A start date - the first payment; the rest fall due on the same day of the month, one period apart (a rule starting on the 31st falls on the last day of shorter months) - and an end date if it is not forever

The recurring rules behind the expected payments

A rule is not a payment. It writes nothing into the books and appears in no report. What it does is produce the Expected payments list at the top of the screen: what has fallen due and is not recorded, and what is coming next. Each line has a Record button that opens the payment form with the date and amount already filled in — you change the amount if this month's bill differs, attach that month's receipt, and post it.

That separation is deliberate:

  • Each payment keeps its own amount and its own receipt. A subscription that went up in March must not rewrite what February cost.
  • Cancelling a service leaves no junk behind. Switch the rule off and the expectations stop; there are no half-filled draft payments to go and delete.

You also get a bell notification when a recurring payment falls due and has not been recorded.

Where this money shows up​

Service payments are period costs: they belong to the month they were paid in, not to any particular candle. They appear:

  • In the Profit report, as Operating expenses, broken down by category
  • In the Purchase ledger, alongside goods receipts
  • In Payables, if they are not paid yet

They deliberately do not touch product unit cost. Spreading studio rent over the units made in a month is a different accounting choice, and Masto Control does not make it for you — if you want overhead inside a product's cost, add it on the BOM card as an other expense, where you control the figure.