The Receipts in Your Van Are Costing You More Than the VAT September 1, 2026 There's a specific pile every tradesperson knows. Wedged above the sun visor, or in the door pocket, or going soft in the cup holder. Trade counter slips, a fuel receipt, something from the wholesaler with the corner torn off. You know you should do something with them. You will, on Sunday. The lost VAT is the obvious cost, and it's the smallest one. The expensive part is that while those receipts are sitting in the van they aren't attached to a job, so you don't know which of your jobs actually made money. 91% of jobs have revenue but no costs Level, a US contractor finance company, analysed operational data exported from field service systems across 2,200+ contractor companies covering 3.84 million jobs. Not a survey. Actual records. The headline: 91% of jobs have revenue recorded but no labour, material or subcontractor cost coded to the job. Their explanation is the important bit: "The costs exist, they're in payroll runs and AP invoices, but they're not allocated." You paid for the materials and the wages. Nothing ties either to the job that consumed them. The consequence is worth pinning above the desk: "This is the silent killer of contractor profitability. Profitable jobs subsidize unprofitable ones, the owner sees a healthy company-level P&L, and individual losers stay invisible until cash gets tight." When costs are tracked, real median job margin lands around 20–50%, not the 80–100% most contractor dashboards display. Those dashboards are showing revenue with nothing subtracted from it. And the blindness concentrates on small jobs: anything under 24 hours accounts for 93% of job count, and those get "bucketed, billed, and forgotten." One caveat that matters. This is a vendor's proprietary dataset, it hasn't been independently audited, and it skews toward larger firms than a two-van operation. Take the direction of travel, not the decimal places. Why this is structurally worse in the trades An agency loses a receipt and loses a receipt. You lose a receipt and lose the ability to price the next job like it. Materials run roughly a quarter to a third of turnover for a specialty contractor, and they arrive as a lot of small transactions spread across several suppliers. UK trade purchasing is estimated at around 92% over-the-counter, the lowest online share of any retail sector. So the single input that most determines whether a job made money is also the one that generates a paper slip, in a hurry, at whichever merchant happened to be closest. There's a tax consequence too. If you're VAT-registered, a valid VAT receipt is what lets you reclaim input VAT — a bank statement generally won't do. The slip that faded in the windscreen took the VAT with it. The admin happens after a full day on site The NOW Report 2026 (140 UK tradespeople, fieldwork by an independent research firm) found 5 hours 20 minutes a week going on quoting, invoicing and chasing payments. That's 277 hours a year, "much of it done in the evenings or at weekends." The same survey found 93% experience stress or anxiety from running their business, and 52% haven't taken a week's holiday in the past year. Other surveys put admin nearer eight to ten hours. Note the spread, though: samples ranging from 140 to 1,300, all of them vendor- or association-commissioned, and no government measurement to check any of it against. We're not going to print an average and call it a fact. What isn't in dispute is when the admin happens. After the working day, by the person who was on the tools for all of it. The compliance layer, and the cash Small contractors carry paperwork most small businesses simply don't. HMRC figures released to the ICAEW Construction Forum show 470,291 penalties for late Construction Industry Scheme returns in a single year, against 145,500 active schemes. That's roughly three penalty events per scheme. In Sweden, ROT applies to the labour cost only, which means splitting labour from materials is job-level cost separation imposed on you by tax law. Meanwhile the cash arrives late. Intrum's European Payment Report 2026 (8,385 businesses) found the gap between agreed terms and actual payment widened from 16 days in 2023 to 20 in 2026. You buy materials in week one and get paid in month three. That's why an untracked receipt is a cash-flow problem rather than a tax-season one. Construction had the highest number of insolvencies of any UK industry in the year to July 2026, and Byggföretagen's economist put the risk exactly where this article is aimed: "Almost every firm that went under in the first half of 2026 had fewer than 10 employees." What an AI coworker actually changes Photograph the receipt at the counter. Vorker reads the supplier, date, amount and VAT off a photo, matches the supplier against your books, and proposes the entry. It checks your own posting history as it goes, so if you always book that wholesaler a particular way, it follows your convention rather than inventing one. It checks for duplicates first. Then it shows you the debit and credit rows in kronor and waits for you to approve. Once you have, it books to Fortnox or Visma and attaches the receipt image, so the documentation ends up living with the transaction. That turns the pile above the sun visor into a thirty-second job you do while still standing at the counter, when you still know which job it was for. Which is really the whole point. The reason 91% of jobs have no cost coded to them isn't ignorance about bookkeeping, it's timing. On Sunday nobody remembers. At the counter you do. Ask questions about your own numbers. Vorker can pull a financial snapshot, run a period health check that flags VAT to pay and unbalanced vouchers, and break down expenses period on period. Two honest limits, since they'll matter to some readers more than others. The deep accounting integration is Fortnox and Visma, which are the two with real bookkeeping logic behind them, so this is strongest for Swedish businesses today. And it reads receipts using a vision model. That model is very good, and it isn't infallible, which is precisely why booking sits behind an approval you have to give. The point You didn't start a contracting business because you enjoy bookkeeping. But the paperwork isn't a tax on the real work. It's how you find out whether the real work is profitable. Ninety-one percent of jobs carry revenue and no costs. Which means most contractors are pricing next year's work on this year's guesses, and only finding out which jobs lost money when the bank balance tells them. The receipts in your van are the missing half of that equation. They're not worth thirty seconds on Sunday. They're worth thirty seconds at the counter. --- Vorker is in beta and free to try at vorker.ai. Sources: Level Index 2026 (2,200+ US contractors, 3.84M jobs); Powered Now/Installer NOW Report 2026 (n=140, UK); Företagarna member survey autumn 2025 (~1,300, Sweden); HMRC figures via ICAEW Construction Forum (year to 31 March 2023); Skatteverket guidance on ROT; Intrum European Payment Report 2026 (n=8,385, 20 countries); Insolvency Service data via BCIS (UK, to July 2026); Byggföretagen (Sweden, 2026); National Buying Group (2023, UK).