Are Jobs required?

We can’t say that jobs are required information for the purposes of justifying the inclusion of an expense in your tax reporting. You should, however, cleave to the notion that expenses which do not include a category will be summarized in Schedule C under Cost of Goods Sold, regardless of whether you list a particular customer or job. Some business types are not so readily able to make this kind of distinction, so “None” will, in those cases, be the correct selection for a job or customer. They will still be summed under Cost of Goods Sold.

On the other hand, if you include a category for an expense – even if it is “Supplies” – these expenses will be summarized in the Schedule C in the section under “Expenses”. In a different parlance, those things that are called “Expenses” on the Schedule C might be called “overhead” or “fixed expenses” ( tho, these are not exactly the same things…). Those things that are called “Cost of Goods Sold” might also be called “variable expenses” because they are variable in the sense that you do not incur these expenses for any other reason than that they are things that you package up and deliver to your clients and customers.

You absolutely should track jobs if you are interested in tracking how profitable your jobs are, in their own right. You should most especially track job or customer if you are billing cost-plus.