A walk through the product, for the person running the business and for the people working the jobs. If something is not behaving as described here, that is worth telling us about — the last section says how.
Incleus raises quotes, invoices and receipts, tracks what a job costs against what it was quoted at, and keeps the records an accountant asks for. It is built for trades businesses in Canada and works in English and French.
It plans, tracks, warns and organizes. It never files a return and never tells you what tax you owe — it reports tax collected and tax paid as separate facts, because what is owed is a determination for you and your accountant.
They are the same document with a different type on it. You compose one in the editor, save it as a draft as often as you like, and issue it when it is right.
Under the lines of a document are two buttons besides Add line item. From catalog searches the items you have saved — type any words from the name, in any order — and adds the one you pick; the list stays open, so you can add several in a row. To put lines in the catalog, use “Save these lines to catalog” on a document that has them. A catalog item is copied onto the document, not linked to it: changing its price later never changes a document it was added to.
From a previous document lists the quotes, invoices and receipts you have issued, the current client's first, and copies one's lines onto the document you are writing — quantities, prices and tax rates included. If the bill-to is still empty it fills in that client too. The earlier document is not touched.
Some lines are deliberately left behind. A line that billed hours or a job cost is tied to the work it billed, and copying it would bill that work a second time; a note under the buttons says how many were left out. You are also told if the earlier document was in another currency or tax mode, or if one of its tax rates has since been removed — that line comes across with no tax until you tick a rate again.
The word at the top — Quote, Estimate — is a label. What decides whether a number can move is the language in the body: whether you said it could, under what conditions, and by how much. A document headed Estimate that reads like a firm price is read as a firm price.
If a number is genuinely provisional, say so in four parts. Leave one out and you have a firm price with a disclaimer attached, which is the worst of both.
Being specific is what makes this read as competence rather than hedging. A named unknown is evidence you have opened that kind of wall before; an unnamed one is evidence you have not thought about it. “Price may vary with site conditions” says only that you have left yourself room.
And what worries the customer is rarely the money — it is being surprised by a bill. That is why the sentence about what happens first reassures more than the number does, and why a ceiling (“not more than $800 above this without your approval”) costs you nothing if your range was honest.
Exclusions settle more disputes than the price does. List what somebody might reasonably assume was included — drywall repair, paint, permits, disposal, parking. The test: if this went wrong, what would they say they thought was in there?
Give the quote a validity date. Material prices move, and a quote with no expiry is a price you offered forever.
All of it goes in the document's notes, and write it as you would want it on the invoice. When your client accepts the quote from its link, the lines, the line taxes, the client details and the notes copy onto an invoice that is issued and emailed to them there and then — so what you wrote at quoting time is what the invoice says, word for word, with no draft in between. If that invoice cannot be issued automatically, it waits on your desk as a draft and you are told. When you mark a quote accepted yourself, the invoice arrives as a draft instead, so anything that genuinely changed can be adjusted before you issue it. Either way the quote is left exactly as issued and keeps its own number.
None of this is legal advice. Whether a particular document binds you depends on your province, your wording and your circumstances — a question for a lawyer rather than for invoicing software.
Once a document is issued it is frozen, and that is deliberate rather than an inconvenience: the customer has a copy, and a record that can be quietly rewritten afterwards is not a record. Correcting an issued invoice means raising another document — a credit, a revision, or a new invoice. The same rule is why a late fee is text on the page and never arithmetic the app applies by itself.
Manual mode is complete, free, and accurate to the line: you set the rates and choose which apply to each line, including several on one line, and inclusive or exclusive pricing. Most businesses need nothing else.
Automatic mode asks Stripe Tax what to charge, once, at the moment you issue. It needs a connected Stripe account, because the answer has to be computed from YOUR registrations rather than ours — otherwise the number would be confidently wrong on the one figure a customer can be audited over.
A client carries the address a document is sent to, whether they are tax exempt, and which language their documents are written in. That last one follows the client, not you: a francophone customer keeps getting French documents no matter who is typing.
A job is a container for work. Attach it to the quote it was priced from and that quote becomes the baseline — costs and hours then measure against it, and the margin chart shows the gap while there is still room to do something about it.
If the customer is re-quoted, the old baseline is kept rather than overwritten. The chart going green should mean the job recovered, not that somebody moved the goalposts.
A job carries a checklist. Each task is a title, somebody it is assigned to, and a date it is due. Assignment is to a person who can open Incleus rather than to a name on your worker list — a task given to a subcontractor with no login is a task nobody sees. Anybody in the organization can tick a task complete; you can add and remove your own.
Tasks assigned to somebody appear on their own screen, which is where a member lands when they sign in — the invoice editor is no use to somebody on a roof. A task past its due date reads as overdue there. Nothing is sent: the list is where you look, and Incleus does not email, notify or chase anybody about a task.
Tasks are a checklist and not a budget. A task does not link to a line on the quote, it carries no money, and ticking one complete changes no margin. Hours and costs attach to the JOB — that is what the baseline measures against — so a task that takes twice as long shows up as hours on the job, not as a figure beside the task.
Photograph a receipt and it is read for you — supplier, total, tax, the lines. What it reads is a PROPOSAL. Nothing becomes a cost until a person checks it and confirms, because one mis-read digit quietly corrupts the margin, then the planned-versus-actual, then the accountant pack.
The image is kept whatever happens to the cost. Deleting a cost never destroys the document behind it.
That is what makes the image worth keeping long after the month it was spent in. Nothing in Incleus deletes a receipt: neither the record nor the file behind it has a delete path, and archiving one puts it away rather than erasing it. The accountant pack lists the costs and points at the images that paid for them, so a question about a figure from two years ago is answered with the document rather than from memory.
Two other things are recorded, because somebody may one day ask. The person who photographs a receipt is not the person who approves it — once submitted they can re-file it onto another job or rename it, and the figures and the approval belong to whoever can post costs. And every time a link to a receipt image is issued, Incleus records who asked, which receipt, and when the key stopped working. What none of this claims is that an image cannot be changed: somebody in your organization can replace the file behind a receipt, and Incleus keeps no earlier version to compare it with.
Your organization has a forwarding address, under Settings → Forwarded bills. Forward a supplier's bill to it, or give the address to a supplier or any service that emails you bills, and the attachments land in your receipts queue, unfiled and pending your approval — exactly where a photographed receipt goes. They are read by the extractor when an owner or admin opens the queue, not when they arrive. Nothing becomes a cost until somebody confirms it.
Mail from an approved sender goes straight to the queue, but only if the sender's domain confirms it really was them — a check called DMARC, made by our mail provider's servers, which the sender cannot fake. Your own team's addresses are approved when you first create the address. Mail from anyone else, or from an approved address whose domain does not confirm it, is held. You decide by who sent it: let it through, let it through and trust that sender from now on, or reject it. Held files are never opened inside Incleus, and they are deleted after fourteen days if nobody decides.
PDFs and photos — JPEG, PNG, GIF or WebP — up to 5 MB each, and up to ten per message. Signature logos and tracking images are ignored. A file's type is decided by its contents rather than its name, so a file that calls itself a PDF but is not one is refused. A receipt written in the body of an email, with no attachment, cannot be imported yet; it is listed under Recent so you know it arrived. The same bill forwarded twice is recognised and added once.
The address works like a key. If it ends up somewhere it should not, replace it in Settings — the old one stops working at once, so update anything that forwards to it. In case an address has leaked, forwarding pauses after 20 messages in an hour or 100 in a day. Incleus never replies to anyone who emails it.
A vehicle lives in Settings, beside your team, because it is the same kind of thing: something the business runs that carries a rate and costs underneath it. You give it a name, say how far it goes on a litre, what you pay for fuel, and roughly how many kilometres it does in a month.
The cost per kilometre is worked out from those, not typed. Fuel is the price of a litre divided by the distance you get from one, and the lease, the insurance, the plates and the tires are added on top — spread over the monthly distance you stated. That figure is what a trip is costed at, and the screen shows the parts so you can see where it came from.
Enter consumption in kilometres per litre, or in miles per gallon if that is the figure you have. If you pick miles per gallon you have to say whether it is a US or an Imperial gallon: they differ by about a fifth, and nothing further down can tell which you meant.
Two things get said out loud rather than left for you to notice. If the rate includes fuel and you are also filing fuel receipts for that vehicle, every job that involves driving is paying for the same fuel twice. If the rate leaves fuel out and no fuel has ever been filed, fuel is counting as nothing — which makes the vehicle look cheaper than it is. Neither is blocked; both are said.
What the vehicle has actually cost you — repairs, tires, a safety — is shown beside the standing costs you typed, so you can correct your own assumption if they disagree. It never changes the rate by itself: an eight-hundred-dollar brake job would otherwise re-price every trip already taken and billed.
A trip is two photographs of the dial, taken hours apart, and the distance is the difference. You pick the vehicle before the first one, and the screen then tells you which photograph it is expecting: one to start a trip, or one to finish the trip already open on that vehicle. You never choose — it follows from whether that vehicle has a trip open.
If somebody takes the van over without the last driver closing their trip, photograph the dial and say you are taking over. That one photograph closes their trip at that reading and starts yours from the same number, so nothing goes missing between the two. The trip that was closed is marked as having ended on somebody else's photograph.
Record private driving too, and tick that it was not for work. It is never charged to a job. It is worth recording because the readings have to run on from each other — a weekend nobody photographs looks exactly like a business trip somebody forgot.
You can read the dial at the start of a period and again at the end. The difference is how far the van really went, and it is the only thing that can find trips that were never recorded at all — everything else checks trips that exist. The screen then shows what was travelled, what was for work, what was private, and what is left over. It does not tell you what share is deductible: that is a judgement about your tax position and not one this app makes.
They are separate on purpose, and it is worth knowing which is which. CONFIRMING A CLOCK-IN says somebody saw this person working. RELEASING THE HOURS says the figure is right and may be billed. CORRECTING A SHIFT changes the times when a clock was not pressed.
Until hours are released they are on no invoice and in no margin figure. A member's hours wait by default; you can grant somebody the right to log hours that count immediately.
A correction never overwrites what the clock recorded. Both are kept and shown side by side, with the reason, which the person it is about can read. A break added afterwards is marked as added rather than clocked, because an inspector asking whether an eating period was given needs to tell those apart.
Released hours reach a customer through the invoice editor: choose the job under “Add unbilled hours” and every released entry that has not been billed becomes its own line, carrying the date and what was worked on. The quantity is the entry's minutes rounded UP to that job's increment — one minute by default, which is no rounding at all — and the rate is the one recorded on the entry, or the job's rate where the entry has none. They arrive as ordinary draft lines, so you can edit, reword or delete them before issuing. Issuing marks those hours billed against that invoice, and they stop appearing in the picker.
Somebody joins by invitation to their email address, which is what proves they are the person you meant. Three permissions are decided when you invite them, and each is off unless you turn it on.
What things cost and what people are paid is owner and admin only, and that is enforced in the database rather than by hiding buttons. A member cannot read a wage or a unit cost even by asking directly.
Revenue, payments with their fees, receivables and aging, voided documents, and tax collected by rate. On the Operations plan it also carries costs, tax paid, and a link from each expense to the receipt behind it. It is built to be handed over — it organizes and exports, and determines nothing.
Free covers quotes, invoices, receipts, clients and manual tax. Automatic tax adds Stripe Tax at issue time. Operations adds jobs, hours, costs, receipt capture, margin and the full accountant pack — and is the tier that allows more than one person to sign in. If a plan lapses your records stay readable and exportable; only adding to them stops.
If you clock in, photograph receipts and tick off tasks, this is the half that matters to you. It all lives on one screen, so you are not hunting between four.
Pick the job and clock in. The clock starts when you press it, not when somebody approves it. Clock out at the end and the shift becomes an entry for an approver to look at.
Start a break and the clock stops counting; come back and it resumes. The times are kept, not just the total, because how long a break was and WHEN it happened are different questions and only one of them satisfies an employment-standards inspector.
Unless you have been given the right to log hours that count immediately, your shift is a request until somebody releases it. Waiting hours are on no invoice and in no margin figure yet. If a figure is changed, whoever changed it has to give a reason, and you can read it.
Photograph the receipt and it is read for you. Check what it read before confirming — you are the one who knows whether that total is right. A trip is two odometer photographs: pick the vehicle first, and the screen tells you whether the one you are taking starts a trip or ends the one already open.
Tasks allocated to you appear with their deadlines. You can tick any task complete, and add or remove your own.
If it has been issued, that is the rule rather than a fault — see above. Raise a credit or a new document. Only drafts are editable.
They are probably waiting to be released. Look under Approvals, or the Hours waiting drawer in the workspace. Until released they are deliberately absent from margins and invoices rather than counted early.
Cost and pay data is owner and admin only. That is a database rule, not a hidden button, so it will not appear by looking somewhere else. Ask an owner if you need it.
Check the junk folder first, especially the first message we ever send to an address — mail providers file an unfamiliar sender there and then learn. Invitations and documents go out through our own sender; sign-up confirmations and password links come from the authentication service. If nothing arrives at all, tell us and we can see whether it was sent.
Use the link on the sign-in page. We email you a link that works once and expires. If you use an authenticator app you will still be asked for a code afterwards — resetting a password has never been a way past it.
There is no self-serve way back, deliberately: a “lost your device” button is exactly the bypass somebody who has stolen your password would use. Write to us and we remove the factor by hand, and record that we did.
Stripe computes tax from the registrations your connected account holds. If you have not added the registration for a place, nothing is collected there. Check that the registration exists and shows as live.
That is a statement, not a fault. It means no supervisor has yet said they saw that person working. Confirming is separate from releasing the hours, and neither blocks the other.
The vehicle list is empty on the mileage screen. Vehicles are added in Settings, and only an owner or admin can add one. If you are neither and the list is empty, ask whoever keeps the books.
A break in the chain is reported between two trips. Usually that is driving nobody logged, which is nothing to fix. If the number looks impossible — or if a trip is shown as starting below where the last one finished — a reading has been misread, and the trip with the wrong number needs correcting.
No, and nothing in the product will let you. Raise a credit note or a revision. The customer is holding a copy of the original.
No. It records what you collected and what you paid, as separate figures, and hands them over cleanly. What is owed is a determination we do not make.
Only for automatic tax or for taking card payments. Manual tax is complete and free, and plenty of businesses never need anything else.
No. Wages, unit costs and margins are owner and admin only, enforced in the database. A member can see what they themselves are paid, and nothing about anyone else.
Your records stay readable and exportable. They are your financial documents and we will not hold them over a billing state. Only adding to them stops.
Yes, on the Operations plan. Invite them by email and choose what they may do without somebody checking first.
No. It is not sold, not pooled with other businesses, and not used for benchmarking — including if this company is ever acquired. Clause 7 of the terms commits to that in writing.
English and Canadian French, throughout. What language a customer's documents are written in follows the customer, and is frozen onto a document when it is issued — so a French invoice stays French even if that client later switches.
Yes. In the invoice editor, pick the job under “Add unbilled hours” and every released, unbilled entry becomes its own line — the date, what was worked on, the hours rounded by that job's rule, and the rate from the entry or the job. They are ordinary draft lines you can still edit. Issuing marks them billed, so the same hour cannot reach a second invoice. Time tracking is not only an internal cost measure; what a worker is PAID and what a client is BILLED are two separate rates on purpose.
No. A task is a title, an assignee and a due date on a job — a checklist, not a budget line. Tasks do not link to a quoted line item, hours are logged against the JOB rather than against a task, and ticking one complete does not move a margin. The job is where money is measured: costs and hours accumulate there, and the margin chart compares them with the quote the job was priced from.
Yes, for anything photographed or uploaded into it. A receipt image is kept whatever happens to the cost it paid for — there is no delete path for the image, and archiving one puts it away rather than erasing it — and the accountant pack lists each cost beside the document behind it. Every figure on a cost was confirmed by a person rather than accepted from the reader, the person who photographed a receipt is not the one who approved it, and each link issued to an image is recorded with who asked and when it expired. What Incleus does not do is tell you what you owe or what a tax authority will accept: it keeps the records and shows you where each number came from.
Write to support@incleus.com. Tell us what you were doing, what you expected, and what happened instead — and if a document or a job is involved, its number or name. That is usually enough to find it.
Found a security problem? security@incleus.com, and read the disclosure page first — it says what we promise and what we do not.
Questions about your personal information, or want a copy of it? privacy@incleus.com.
Incleus is invoicing, quotes and receipts for independent operators and small trades in Canada — with the tax handled per line rather than guessed at. Free to start, and the invoicing stays free. No card to begin.
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