For any business that runs jobs
Know what every job is really making.
Surplu brings revenue, expenses and labour together so any business that works job by job can see job profit clearly — before small overruns become expensive surprises.
No credit card to start. Works alongside Xero.
Profit this quarter
$17,600
Riverside deck rebuild
$6,15033%
$18,400 in · $12,250 costs
Unit 4 bathroom fit-out
$1,70018%
$9,600 in · $7,900 costs
Warehouse lighting upgrade
$9,40038%
$24,500 in · $15,100 costs
Hillside retaining wall
$3503%
$11,200 in · $10,850 costs
The problem
The numbers exist. They just never meet.
Most job-based businesses have every figure they need — scattered across an accounting system, a pile of receipts and someone's memory of who worked where.
Revenue and costs live in different places
Invoices in one system, supplier bills in another, wages somewhere else again. Nothing puts them against the job.
Labour is the hardest cost to pin down
Hours get remembered at the end of the week and attached to whatever job seems closest.
Spreadsheets go stale the day you build them
They are accurate for about a week, then quietly stop matching reality.
Margin turns up too late to act on
By the time the job is invoiced and the bills are in, the overrun already happened.
You cannot answer "which jobs made money"
Not quickly, and not without an evening of adding things up.
How it works
Four steps, then it keeps itself current.
Set it up once. After that it is a short queue of decisions rather than an evening with a spreadsheet.
Set up your business and jobs
Create the business, add the jobs you are running, and pick a category set for your industry. Every category carries its GST treatment and decides whether a cost hits job profit or overhead.
Connect Xero, or import a file
Authorise Xero and pull your transactions in, or upload a CSV or QIF straight from your bank. Map your bank’s columns once, preview every row, then import.
Code costs and hours to jobs
Work the queue of uncoded expenses — approve, skip or split. Record hours against jobs and approve them for the pay period.
Read the margin
Job profit, category breakdowns and quarter-on-quarter comparisons. Drill into any figure on the dashboard.
Allocating a transaction to a job in Surplu is a separate thing from reconciling it in Xero. Keep reconciling your accounts in Xero — Xero stays your accounting system of record.
What you get
Everything against the job, not the month.
Each of these is a screen you can open on day one. Every plan includes all of them — the only thing that changes is how many jobs you can run at once.
Job profitability
Revenue, materials, subcontractors and labour on every job, with the margin that falls out of it. One engine behind every figure, so the dashboard and the job agree.
Transaction review
A queue of uncoded costs. Surplu suggests a job and tells you why; you approve, skip or split. Bulk-approve the obvious ones, and undo anything.
Expense splitting
One supplier bill across several jobs. The parts have to balance to the cent before it will save.
Allocation rules
Turn a decision into a rule for next time. The rules are yours, written by you, and every suggestion still waits for your approval.
Labour costing
Hours against jobs — ordinary, overtime, travel and leave — approved per pay period. Approved hours lock in the pay rate, so a later rise cannot move old job costs.
Quoted versus actual
Put the quoted value on the job and watch real revenue, costs and profit track against it as the work goes on.
Who it is for
Built for businesses that work in jobs.
If the work has a start, a finish and a number attached, Surplu will tell you what it made. It is not tuned to one industry — the categories you start from are, and you can change them.
Xero
Alongside Xero. Never instead of it.
You authorise the connection at Xero. Surplu imports the accounting and transaction data you have permitted, and uses it to work out which job each cost belongs to.
Surplu only reads from Xero
It does not write back. Your Xero records are unchanged by anything you do here.
We never receive your bank credentials
Bank data reaches Xero through Xero’s own arrangement with your bank. Surplu only sees what Xero already holds.
Bank reconciliation stays in Xero
Surplu does not reconcile, and coding a cost to a job here is not reconciling it there.
Disconnect whenever you like
From Settings. We remove the stored connection and ask Xero to revoke our access.
Xero is a trade mark of Xero Limited. Surplu is not affiliated with or endorsed by Xero.
How your data is handled
Plain facts, not badges.
No certifications are claimed here, because none have been earned yet. What follows is how the software is actually built.
Access follows membership, checked on the server
Which business you can see is decided by your membership record on the server, not by anything your browser can set or send.
Sensitive operations run behind protected functions
Business records are not readable straight from the browser. Reads and writes go through backend functions that check who you are first.
Billing state is server-controlled
Your plan and trial status are written by the server and by Stripe’s webhook. They cannot be set from the browser.
We never see your bank logins
Xero connects by OAuth — you sign in at Xero, not here — and Surplu only reads. Card details go to Stripe; Surplu never sees them.
You can disconnect Xero yourself
Disconnecting removes the stored connection and asks Xero to revoke our access. Nothing in your Xero account changes.
Your coding survives a re-sync
Re-importing refreshes the fields Xero owns and leaves your job, category and allocation decisions alone.
Questions
The three people ask first.
- Does it replace Xero?
- No, and it is not designed to. Xero stays your accounting system of record. Surplu sits alongside it, reads the data you permit, and answers a question Xero does not: which job was that, and did it make money?
- Does it reconcile my bank transactions?
- No. Bank reconciliation stays in Xero. Coding a transaction to a job in Surplu is a separate activity and does not change your accounting records.
- How does the free trial work?
- You get the full product with no job limit, and no credit card is needed to start. When the trial ends, access to the application is restricted until you choose a plan. Nothing is deleted — your data is waiting for you.
Stop guessing which jobs make money.
Start a 14-day free trial with the full product and no job limit. Nothing is charged until you choose a plan.