Expense them when you buy them. Detergents, disinfectants, trash bags, gloves, paper towels, mop heads, sponges, and similar supplies are consumed quickly and purchased in amounts that are small relative to your total business expenses. There is no practical reason to track these as inventory on your balance sheet.

This comes down to materiality. If a $200 supply run at Restaurant Depot or Costco doesn’t meaningfully change your financial picture, it gets recorded as an expense in the period you bought it. For the vast majority of cleaning service operators, that describes every supply purchase they make throughout the year. Your time is better spent running jobs than maintaining a spreadsheet of how many bottles of Fabuloso you have on hand.

The one situation where inventory or prepaid treatment might apply is a large bulk purchase near year-end that you won’t use until the following year. Say you spend $3,000 on supplies in late December and most of those supplies will be consumed over the next three to four months. If that amount is significant for your business, your accountant may want to record the unused portion as a prepaid expense and move it to expense as you use it. This keeps your financial statements from overstating expenses in one year and understating them in the next.

In practice, this rarely happens for NYC-based cleaning operators. Storage space in the Bronx and across the five boroughs is expensive and limited. Most operators buy supplies on a rolling basis as needed rather than stockpiling months of inventory. If you’re buying weekly or biweekly and using what you buy within the same period, expensing on purchase is the correct and simplest treatment.

The IRS also supports this approach. Under the de minimis safe harbor election, businesses can expense items costing up to $2,500 per invoice without capitalizing them. Your typical supply purchases fall well within that threshold.

What matters more than the inventory question is consistent categorization. Keep cleaning supplies in their own expense account so you can see what you’re spending over time. If supply costs are climbing quarter over quarter, that tells you something useful about pricing, waste, or crew behavior. A good set of books from your Bronx bookkeepers will surface those trends without the overhead of formal inventory tracking.

If you’re ever unsure whether a specific purchase is big enough to warrant special treatment, ask your bookkeeper or accountant. But for day-to-day supply purchases, the answer is straightforward. Expense it and move on.