Tutorial — Choosing the Right Cost Category

What This Tool Is For

A practical decision guide for the moment of truth in every cost entry: which bucket?

Step-by-Step Walkthrough

Work through these questions in order:

Q1 — Will it benefit the business for more than a year? A laptop, a server, multi-year license → CAPEX. It becomes an asset and is expensed gradually; the assets tool takes over from there.

Q2 — Is it spend aimed at acquiring customers? Ads, agencies, sponsorships, sales commissions → Marketing. Keeping this clean is what makes your acquisition-cost numbers trustworthy.

Q3 — Does it support the whole company rather than any one product? Office rent, accounting fees, general insurance → Overhead.

Q4 — Otherwise, it's a running cost of operating: hosting, tools, payroll, utilities → OPEX.

Special cases: Depreciation and Amortization categories are normally filled by the asset tools automatically — you rarely select them by hand. If you find yourself doing so, pause and check whether the underlying purchase should have been registered as an asset instead.

Real-World Example

Scenario: Four purchases land on Nina's desk the same morning: a $2,500 laptop (multi-year → CAPEX), a $4,200 monthly cloud bill (running → OPEX), a $12,000 ad campaign (acquisition → Marketing), and the office's $3,000 rent (whole-company → Overhead). Four costs, four categories, ninety seconds of thought — and every downstream report from gross margin to acquisition cost stays clean.

Tips & Common Mistakes

• When two categories both seem defensible, choose by the QUESTION the cost should answer later: "what does it cost to run the product?" (OPEX) vs "what does it cost to win a customer?" (Marketing).
• Keep a one-page internal convention sheet for your recurring vendors so everyone categorizes them identically.
• Recategorizing history changes past reports — treat it as a formal correction, not a casual edit.

---

Everything described in this tutorial is a working feature of TupicFinance, the financial management platform of the Tupic ecosystem. The screens, workflows, and guardrails above behave exactly as written there — this guide doubles as the platform's user manual for this tool.