Home Depot "Pro Xtra" account tracks all your purchases

[Johann Jells]

Where has this been my whole life!! They keep an online record of all your purchases and email you receipts with your job number on it.  No more wondering where are all those receipts if you get audited. The data can be exported to a spreadsheet. You can use any card or cards, doesn't have to be their credit. Amazing.

[Greg Widdicombe]

I love the export to Excel feature, especially if you have multiple jobs and use multiple cards.  Here's why (and apologies if this is too Excel geeky):

If you do your own bookkeeping in something like QB, and can't easily import transactions, then entering them individually is a pain - especially with multiple cards/jobs, and if you want to track your expenditures at a more detailed level like Drywall, HVAC, framing, etc.

Dumping the transactions to Excel allows you to pivot the data by data elements like Month, Job, Department, so that you can generate a summarized journal entry which can then be entered into QB once - you just need to keep the detailed data somewhere accessible for backup.

Example:

If I pivot my home depot detailed data for March 2015 I see that I had expenditures for one job for the following departments:

BLDG. MATERIALS

ELECTRICAL

HARDWARE

KIT/BATH

LUMBER

MILLWORK

PLUMBING

WALL&FLOOR COVER.

WINDOW/WALL

It's pretty easy to map these to however I track expenditure in my WIP accounts in QB and then enter a single journal entry for March that balances the total charged to the card against individual items for each of the above.  No one really cares that I visited Home Deport 8 times to pickup lumber, and twice more to pickup both lumber and fasteners.  From a bookkeeping standpoint I just need to know that for job XYZ I spent $456.23 on lumber, and that it is tracked correctly as a rehab expenditure for that job.

The only issue I have with the Excel data is that the summary file contains the Job Name and Card Used - you will need to pull that into the detailed file before pivoting.