📖 Documentation

👋 Throughout the examples in this guide we use two fictional contractor workspaces: Bob's Company (Bob and his partner Alice, plus an employee named Igor) and Tom's Company (Tom solo, plus an employee named Sam). They show up whenever we need a concrete example of how a feature plays out across two organizations.

🚀 Getting started

My Book Pad is a job ledger built for insurance restoration contractors. It tracks projects, expenses, employees, cross-org collaboration, and profit splits all in one place.

Creating your workspace

1. Sign up at mybookpad.com. Pick a workspace name (e.g. Bob's Company), a workspace ID (e.g. bobs-company), your admin email, and a password. No credit card required.
2. Confirm your email. We send a confirmation link to the address you signed up with. Click it to activate the workspace — you'll be auto-logged-in afterward.
3. Your 3-month free trial starts immediately. Every feature is unlocked — log expenses, run jobs, collaborate, settle up. We won't auto-charge anything.

Your first dashboard visit

The first time you sign in to a brand-new workspace, you'll see a welcome banner with three quick wins: create your first project, log your first expense, invite a partner workspace. It auto-hides once you've taken any action — or you can dismiss it with "Skip the tour".

Below the welcome banner, a setup checklist tracks the rest:

• ✓ Set your organization name
• ✓ Set the default tax rate
• ✓ Add your first client
• ✓ Create your first project
• ✓ Log your first expense
• ✓ Invite a teammate
• ✓ Invite a partner workspace

Work through it and it'll celebrate when you hit 7/7. Dismiss it anytime — it'll never come back for that workspace.

🏠 Projects & phases

A project is one job — typically one address. Pick the right type when you create it:

• Insurance — has fields for claim number, deductible, adjuster, insurance company, date of loss. Use this for restoration / claim work.
• Retail — simpler form, just client + address + scope. Use for cash jobs or anything not insurance-driven.

Phases (Emergency + Rebuild)

Most insurance claims have two phases — Emergency (mitigation, drying, etc.) and Rebuild (reconstruction). Both bill separately but belong to the same claim. My Book Pad models this directly:

• Create the project with Emergency phase first.
• When the rebuild is ready to start, open the project and click + Add phase. Pre-fills client + claim info.
• Each phase tracks its own expenses, payments, and "paid in full" status. The claim group view shows them together with combined totals.

Statuses

A phase flows through these states:

• Pending — quoted/approved, work not started.
• Open — work in progress. Expenses can only be logged against open phases.
• Halted — paused (insurance dispute, weather, etc).
• Completed — work done, awaiting final payment.
• Archived — closed out and out of active lists, still searchable.

Paid in full

Each phase has a separate Paid in full toggle at the top of the project page (and on the Money tab). It's independent of status — useful when the insurer settles a phase before you've marked the work complete, or when you want to stop showing "outstanding" even though a small balance technically remains.

Example. Tom's Company quoted $10,000 for an Emergency phase but the insurer settled at $9,800 final. Tom logs the $9,800 payment, then clicks ✓ Paid in full. The math snaps: Collected jumps to $10,000 (the quoted amount), Outstanding goes to $0, profit recalculates, and the per-partner take-back row updates. Click again to revert.

Profit splits

For partner-run businesses, the org-wide default split (e.g. 50/50) applies to every project. Override on a single project under Settings tab → Profit split. Cross-org partners (other workspaces) take their share first; whatever's left is split among internal partners.

🧾 Expenses & receipts

The fastest way to log an expense is from your phone:

1. Tap the 📷 Scan button (bottom-tab on mobile).
2. Pick the project this receipt is for.
3. Tap the upload area → "Take photo" or pick from gallery.
4. Wait ~3 seconds. Gemini reads the receipt and fills in vendor, subtotal, tax, total, date, and category.
5. Confirm and save.

Paid by

Every expense is tagged with who paid for it. Employees default to themselves; partners can switch. This is the source of truth for the reimbursement flow below.

Mileage

Mileage is a special expense category. Log the date, project, and kilometers — the app multiplies by your org's per-km rate (set in Org settings) and tracks the dollar amount automatically. The CRA's current standard rate is a sensible default.

Billable flag

Mark an expense billable if you intend to invoice the cost back to the client. Reports break out billed vs. unbilled so nothing slips through.

💵 Reimbursements

Reimbursements are the process of paying an employee back for receipts they covered out-of-pocket. The math behind who-took-what-slice-of-the-pie depends on getting this right, so every paid-back receipt must specify which partner reimbursed it.

The flow

1. Igor (Bob's Company employee) logs a $113 Home Depot receipt against an active project — paid by Igor.
2. The receipt shows as Outstanding on the project's Expenses tab and on the org-wide Employee Expenses list.
3. Bob pays Igor $113 in cash. Bob opens the expense row, clicks ✓ Paid ▾, and picks Bob from the partner menu. (Alice would also show up here — Bob picks whoever actually paid.)
4. The row flips to Paid · Bob. From now on the math attributes that $113 to Bob's "Cash laid out".

Two places you can do this

• Per-project — Project page → Expenses tab → row's ✓ Paid ▾ dropdown.
• Org-wide — Employee Expenses in the sidebar. Single-row picker or bulk-pick at the top for marking a batch at once.

Fixing a wrong partner

Clicked ✓ Paid ▾ and accidentally picked Alice when Bob actually paid? Open the ✓ Paid ▾ menu on that same row again — the current partner is shown with a ✓ mark. You can:

• Click a different partner — switches the attribution. The reimbursement date stays as-is (we only fix the who, not the when).
• Click the red ↺ Revert to outstanding at the top — clears the reimbursement entirely and the receipt goes back to Outstanding.

Why this matters. The per-partner take-back math (next section) attributes each reimbursed receipt to whichever partner actually wrote the cheque. If Bob covers $500 of Igor's receipts and Alice covers $300, they each get that amount credited back to them — plus their profit share. Picking the wrong partner shifts dollars from one to the other, so the fix-it dropdown matters.

💰 Money & take-back

The Money tab on every project (and the Settle Up page) shows the slice-of-the-pie picture: what each partner walks away with from the job. The math is laid out so you can sanity-check every number.

The formula

For each partner on a project:

Take-back = Cash laid out + Profit share

• Cash laid out = receipts this partner paid for themselves plus employee receipts they reimbursed. Tax included. Hover the number to see the breakdown of own-receipts vs reimbursements.
• Profit share = (net revenue − marketing fee − total expenses) × this partner's split %. HST collected from the client is excluded because it's owed to the government, not profit.
• Take-back = the sum. The cash this partner literally walks out of the job with.

Worked example

Bob's Company (Bob 60% / Alice 40%) finishes an insurance job:

• Insurer paid $11,300 (= $10,000 net + $1,300 HST collected)
• Marketing fee: 0%
• Bob paid $300 of his own receipts
• Alice paid $200 of her own receipts
• Igor logged $500 of receipts; Bob reimbursed all of them
• Total expenses: $1,000

The math:

• Net revenue = $10,000 (HST is owed back to government, so it's not profit)
• Profit = $10,000 − $1,000 = $9,000
• Bob's profit share = $9,000 × 60% = $5,400
• Alice's profit share = $9,000 × 40% = $3,600
• Bob's cash laid out = $300 (own) + $500 (reimbursed Igor) = $800
• Alice's cash laid out = $200
• Bob's take-back = $800 + $5,400 = $6,200
• Alice's take-back = $200 + $3,600 = $3,800
• Combined take-back = $10,000 ✓ (matches net revenue)

Outstanding receipts

An employee receipt that hasn't been reimbursed yet doesn't count toward anyone's "Cash laid out" — the company owes the employee, but no partner has covered it yet. The receipt does still reduce profit (it's a real cost). Once you mark it ✓ Paid ▾ by a specific partner, it flips from "Owed to employee" into that partner's cash-laid-out total.

🤝 Cross-org collaboration

Sub out part of a job to another contractor who also uses My Book Pad — without giving them access to your whole workspace.

Walkthrough — Bob subs Tom in on the rebuild

Bob's Company landed a fire-restoration claim. The Emergency phase is theirs alone, but the Rebuild is bigger than they want to handle solo. Bob brings Tom's Company in on the Rebuild phase at a 60/40 split (60% Bob's, 40% Tom's, since Bob brought the client).

1. Bob opens the Rebuild project. On the Overview tab there's a Collab card. He clicks + Invite a partner workspace.
2. In the form: pastes Tom's workspace code (e.g. toms-company) → split 40% → optional note ("You handle the drywall + paint, I keep the claim management") → Send.
3. Tom signs in to his own workspace and sees a sidebar badge ("New collab invite"). He opens it, reviews the terms, clicks Accept.
4. Both workspaces now show the Rebuild project tagged with a ↔ Shared pill. Tom can log expenses, notes, and photos against the project from his side.
5. Bob's view of the project shows Tom's expenses with a ↔ partner badge so it's obvious which side logged what. Tom's view is symmetric.

Two scopes

• Per-project — share just one specific project. Use this for one-off subbing arrangements.
• Workspace-wide — share every current and future project automatically. Use this when Bob and Tom have an ongoing partnership and want all jobs to be split by default.

Data ownership

Each workspace writes to its own database. When Tom logs a receipt against a shared project, that receipt lives in Tom's workspace — Bob's view reads it through the collaboration link. If Bob revokes the collab, Tom's receipts stay in Tom's workspace; Bob just stops seeing them. Same in the other direction.

Either side can revoke at any time from Org Settings → Partnerships. Revoking immediately hides the project on the other side.

💸 Settle up

The Settle-up page (sidebar nav) has two sections, each answering a different question.

Partners in your workspace

The top section rolls up every internal partner's take-back across every project in your workspace. Same math as the per-project Money tab, summed over all jobs.

Example. At the end of the quarter, Bob's Company has run 4 jobs. The "Partners in your workspace" table shows Bob laid out $2,400 in cash, has $14,300 in profit share, and his take-back is $16,700. Alice's row: $1,100 cash laid out, $9,500 profit share, $10,600 take-back. Combined: $27,300 in cash to distribute between the two of them.

Cross-org partnerships

The bottom section is for money owed between workspaces. For every active partner workspace (Tom's Company in our example), you'll see a card with the net balance:

• You owe Tom's Company $X if his side of shared projects exceeds yours, or
• Tom's Company owes you $X if the opposite, or
• ✓ Square if everything's even.

Each card breaks the balance down per-project so you can see exactly which jobs drove it. Click 💸 Record a payment on the card to log an e-transfer / cheque in either direction. Past settlements live in the Settlement history table at the bottom of the page.

How the cross-org math works

For each shared project with Tom's Company at P% split for Tom:

• Total profit = client paid − your expenses on this project − their expenses on this project
• Their profit share = profit × (P / 100)
• You owe them = their profit share + reimbursement for their out-of-pocket expenses
• Minus any settlements already paid in their direction

👥 Team & roles

Four roles control what each user sees:

• Admin — sees everything. Adds users, edits org settings, manages partnerships, runs billing.
• Partner — sees finances, runs reports, participates in profit splits and take-back math, but can't edit team or org-level settings.
• Supervisor — sees address + client name + phone on assigned projects. Can log expenses. Doesn't see financials.
• Employee — sees only the jobs they're assigned to. Logs their own expenses. Cannot see other employees' receipts or claim financials.

Example. Bob's Company has Bob (admin), Alice (partner), Igor (employee). Bob and Alice both show up in the ✓ Paid ▾ reimbursement picker and in the Take-back table. Igor doesn't — he's not a partner, he doesn't share profit. Igor logs his own receipts, sees only the jobs Bob assigned him to, and can't see Alice's reimbursement receipts at all.

Per-role visibility

Admin can fine-tune what Supervisor and Employee see in Org Settings → Role visibility. For example, you can let Supervisors see project descriptions but hide adjuster contact info.

Assigning jobs

From a project's detail page, open the Team tab. Pick employees. They'll see the job in their My jobs list on next login.

📊 Reports & tax

Three views:

• Reports — month-over-month revenue, profit by project, expense trends, settle-up status.
• Tax — every expense for a calendar year, grouped by category, with CSV export. Hand it straight to your accountant.
• Employee expenses — outstanding reimbursements owed to your field staff, per person. Same place where you mark receipts paid via the ✓ Paid ▾ dropdown.

💳 Plans & billing

All workspaces start on a 3-month free trial with every feature unlocked. After the trial, you need to subscribe or the workspace becomes read-only (you can still see everything, you just can't add new expenses, payments, or projects).

Subscribe from Billing in the sidebar. Existing subscribers manage cards / change plans / cancel via the Stripe Customer Portal. Cancellation is immediate — you keep access until the end of the current billing period.

What "Comped" means

Comped is a free unlimited plan granted manually by our support team — usually for partners, early adopters, or organizations we want to support directly. If your workspace is comped, your Billing page shows 🎁 Comped instead of the usual trial/subscription status, and you can't subscribe or be charged from the Subscribe buttons (they're disabled). Email support@mybookpad.com if you think your org should be comped.

💡 Phases of the same claim don't count separately toward your project cap. A 2-phase Emergency + Rebuild claim uses 1 project slot.

📱 Mobile & PWA

My Book Pad is a Progressive Web App — install it to your home screen for a native-like experience.

iPhone

1. Open mybookpad.com in Safari (NOT Chrome — Safari is the only browser that allows PWA install on iOS).
2. Tap the share button (square with up-arrow).
3. Scroll and pick Add to Home Screen.
4. Pick a name (defaults to "My Book Pad"). Done.

Android

Chrome will automatically prompt "Add to Home screen" after a couple of visits. Accept the prompt or use the menu → Install app.

🔒 Security & privacy

• Per-workspace data isolation. Each workspace has its own SQLite database. No workspace can see another workspace's data (cross-org collab is opt-in via explicit invitations).
• Encrypted in transit. All traffic is HTTPS with valid TLS certs.
• Passwords hashed. bcrypt with per-user salts. We never see your password.
• No ads, no third-party trackers. Your job data is yours.
• Receipt OCR. Receipt photos get sent to Google's Gemini API to extract the text. The photos are not retained by Google after the request and aren't used for training.
• You can export anytime. Most list views have a CSV button.
• You can delete anytime. Org Settings → Danger zone → Delete workspace. Data is kept for 30 days for restore, then permanently deleted.

For the full legal terms see Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, and Cookie Policy.

⚡ Tips & shortcuts

• Install to home screen. Run as a native-feeling app — see the Mobile section above.
• Pin a project. Star a project to keep it at the top of your dashboard.
• Search is global. The Search page matches across clients, projects, vendors, and expenses.
• Clone a project. Open one and use Clone to spin up a copy with the same scope.
• Vendor autocomplete. As you type a vendor in the expense form, past vendors suggest themselves.
• Photo lightbox. Click any receipt or project photo to view it full-screen.
• Bulk reimburse. On Employee Expenses, check several rows, pick the partner who paid, click Mark selected as paid back.
• Hover the "Cash laid out" cell in the take-back table for the own-vs-reimbursed split.
• Long vendor name? The Expenses table ellipsizes anything too wide — hover to see the full name in a tooltip.
• Dark mode. Tap the sun/moon icon in the top-right.
• Multiple workspaces. If your email is on multiple workspaces, the Org Picker shows up after login so you can choose which one to enter.

❓ FAQ

Is My Book Pad only for insurance restoration contractors?

It works for any small contractor that tracks jobs, receipts, and profit splits — but every feature is built around the way restoration work moves (claim numbers, adjusters, Emergency + Rebuild phases, partner subs). If you're doing insurance restoration, it'll be the most opinionated tool you'll find.

What happens after the 3-month trial?

If you don't subscribe, your workspace becomes read-only — you can still log in and see everything, but you can't add new expenses, payments, or projects until billing is set up. Your data is kept safely either way for at least 30 days.

Can I switch plans later?

Yes. Go to Billing → Manage subscription. The Stripe Customer Portal lets you upgrade or downgrade. Changes take effect at the next billing period; you're not charged retroactively.

My receipt didn't scan correctly.

The OCR works on most printed receipts but can struggle with handwritten ones, faded thermal paper, or extreme angles. Just type in the fields manually — your edits save.

An employee says they can't see a job.

Check that you've assigned them. Open the project → Team tab → Assign. Employees only see jobs they're explicitly on.

I clicked "Paid" on a receipt but picked the wrong partner. How do I fix it?

Open the row's ✓ Paid ▾ dropdown again. The current partner is shown with a ✓ mark. Click any other partner to switch (the reimbursement date stays the same), or click the red ↺ Revert to outstanding at the top to wipe it entirely.

Why did "Paid in full" not change my Collected number until I refreshed?

It always reloads the page after the click — the new numbers come from the server. If you're sure you clicked but the number didn't move, double-check that the project actually has a Quoted total set (Settings tab → Estimate amount). Without a quoted amount, "Paid in full" has nothing to snap Collected up to.

How do I close out a finished job?

Open the project, change status to Completed, then mark each phase Paid in full as payments come in. Once everything's settled, change status to Archived to remove from your active lists.

I forgot my password.

Use the forgot password link on the sign-in page. We'll email you a reset link valid for 24 hours.

Can I export everything?

Yes. Most list views have CSV export. The Tax page exports every expense for a calendar year.

What if I want to delete my workspace?

Admin only. Go to Org Settings → Danger zone → Delete this workspace. Type your workspace ID to confirm. We keep your data for 30 days in case you change your mind, then permanently delete.

My partner's name shows up in the reimbursement picker even though they're not actively involved. Why?

Anyone with role admin or partner in your workspace shows up in the partner picker, because they're the people who can share profit. If a partner has left, change their role to Employee (or remove them entirely) under Team → edit user. They'll drop off the picker and the Take-back table.

📨 Something missing? Email support@mybookpad.com with what you wish this page covered.