Expenses cover money going out that is not payroll: company spending, and colleagues claiming back what they paid personally.
Both live here because both need the same things, and separating them means two processes and two places to look.
Two shapes of the same record
An expense is either something the company paid directly or something a person paid and wants back. The form is the same and the difference is who is out of pocket.
Getting that flag right matters at the end: a company expense marked as a claim produces a reimbursement to somebody who never spent their own money, and the error is only obvious when the payment lands.
Raising one
What was bought, how much, when, which category, and which currency.
A receipt belongs on it. Not for the platform's sake, for the audit's. An expense with no receipt is a claim; an expense with one is a record. The difference matters at year end and matters more if anybody ever asks.
Categorise honestly. The category decides which account it eventually posts to, and a miscategorised expense produces a small, permanent inaccuracy in your accounts that nobody ever goes back to fix.
The states
Draft. Being prepared.
Submitted and pending. With an approver.
Approved. Agreed, and payable.
Rejected. Sent back, with a reason.
Paid. Settled.
Approved and paid are deliberately different. An approved expense is a commitment you owe; a paid one is money gone. Treating them as the same is how a payables figure ends up understating what is owed.
Personal claims
Somebody who paid for something with their own money raises the same kind of record, and it follows the same route.
Two things make this work in practice.
Claim promptly. A claim submitted six weeks later needs the person to remember the context, and reimbursements delayed by slow claiming are read as the company being slow.
Attach the receipt at the moment you have it, usually from a phone. A receipt in a wallet is a receipt that will not be attached.
Attaching the receipt
Anything that supports the claim: a photograph, a PDF, a forwarded confirmation.
A photograph taken at the time beats a search for the email later, which is the whole reason to claim from a phone. The most common cause of an unsupported expense is not dishonesty, it is a receipt that was never captured and could not be found six weeks on.
It is read, not just stored
An attached receipt can be scanned, and the details it finds are offered back into the form rather than being typed.
Treat what comes back as a draft. Scanning is good at an amount and a date and less good at deciding which category something belongs to, and the category is the field with accounting consequences. Check it before submitting.
Currency
An expense in a foreign currency records the amount as it happened and the base-currency equivalent alongside.
That is the honest way to hold a business that spends in several currencies, and it is why totals in this section are trustworthy rather than being a sum of mixed units.
Company spending versus personal claims
The same record type, and two different things worth separating in your head.
Company spending is money already gone from a company account. Approving it is a review, and rejecting it does not un-spend anything; it flags a problem.
A personal claim is money the person is owed. Approving it creates a payment, and delay is felt personally.
Both matter. The second is where slowness is noticed, and it is the argument for working the queue often rather than thoroughly.
Approval
Everything goes through the approval queue, which has its own article.
The short version: an expense waits for whoever is responsible, and where your organisation requires more than one level, it waits for each in turn. The person who raised it sees where it is without asking.
Rejections are cheap
A rejected expense is not a failure of the process, it is the process working.
Two things make rejections painless. Give the actual reason, which is almost always a missing receipt or an unclear description. And reject early, because a claim rejected the same day is a two-minute fix and one rejected a fortnight later needs the person to reconstruct what it was.
What posting does
An approved expense posts to the ledger, and paying it posts again.
Which account it hits comes from the category, through the mapping layer. That is the reason categorisation is worth taking seriously, and it is inspectable if a category is landing somewhere wrong.
What approval is checking
Three things, and only the first is about the money.
Is it legitimate? Did this happen, for the business, at this amount.
Is it categorised correctly? Which decides where it lands in the accounts.
Is the evidence attached? A receipt, for anything above the threshold your organisation sets.
An approver who checks only the amount is checking the least informative of the three.
Keeping it clean
One expense per thing. A single claim covering a week of miscellaneous spending is impossible to review and impossible to categorise, and it will be approved without being read.
Describe it for somebody who was not there. "Client dinner, Meridian, three attendees" beats "Dinner".
Do not batch at month end. Expenses submitted in a block are approved in a block, which means they are not really approved.
Categories are an accounting decision
The category on an expense is not a label for searching. It decides which account the expense eventually posts to, through the mapping layer.
That has two consequences worth knowing.
Getting it wrong is a permanent small error. Nobody re-categorises historical expenses, so a year of miscategorised spending is a year of accounts that are quietly slightly wrong.
Adding a category is an accounting change, not an administrative one. A new category with no mapping behind it lands somewhere generic, and somebody has to decide where it belongs.
Approving your own
Most organisations should not allow it, and the approval policy is where that is enforced rather than here.
Worth checking once. An expense process where the approver can approve their own claims has no control in it, and it is the first thing any audit looks at.
What is not here
Payroll, which has its own surface and its own approval.
Supplier invoices as a formal payables ledger. Expenses cover what your organisation spends; a full purchase-order and supplier-invoice workflow is a different shape and is not part of this surface today.
A full purchase-order workflow. Raising a PO, matching it to a supplier invoice and a delivery is a different shape from an expense and is not modelled here.
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