Expenses overview

Expenses streamlines your company's expense reporting and approval process. Employees remotely located from their approving supervisors can enter expense reports, which are then automatically routed to their supervisors for approval. Supervisors receive an email notification when their employees submit an expense report.

Supervisors can do the following:

• View the submitted expense report.
• Approve the submitted expense report as is.
• Request changes or additional detail.

After the expense report is approved, it becomes a bill, at which point accounting staff processes it, prints a check, or issues an online payment. Then, the appropriate data is automatically posted to other applications, such as Accounts Payable and the General Ledger.

Employees can do the following:

• Check the status of their expense reports in the approval and payment cycle.
• Review their entire expense history.

Expense report status descriptions

On the Expense list page, you can also view the state of an expense report under the State column. The following table describes what each state means and whether or not the expense report is editable.

Editable expense report states

State	Description	Editable?
Draft	An editable version of an expense report that has been saved for further editing. Drafts have not yet been submitted for approval or posted to the GL.	Yes
Submitted	The expense report has been submitted to an approver. It has not been approved, paid, or posted to the GL.	No
Partially approved	Partially approved expense reports might either be awaiting other approvers and/or have line items that have not yet been approved. Partially approved expense reports are not yet posted to the GL.	Yes
Approved	The expense report is approved and posted to the GL, but not yet paid.	Only for Staff expense reports (with limited changes*)
Partially declined	One or more line items have been declined. This usually requires that you need to make a change to the expense report and then resubmit it.	Yes
Declined	The entire expense report has been declined. (For example, an expense report that was not approved by a manager.) This usually requires that you need to make a change to the expense report and then resubmit it.	Yes
Partially paid	One or more items on the expense report have been paid.	No
Paid	The expense report has been fully paid.	No
Reverse Reversal	You can only reverse expense reports, which have already been paid. After you reverse an expense report, the state changes to Reversed. A Reversal record is created with a negative amount to net out your Reversed expense report.	No
Selected	The expense report has been selected for reimbursement by a manager. Selected expense reports are not editable.	No

* For approved staff expense reports, you can make limited edits only, such as changing the Paid To or Paid For details, or uploading an attachment. You can also change a line item from reimbursable to non-reimbursable by selecting a different payment type. You can add another line item to an expense report if the item is non-reimbursable.

Employees can enter their expenses as they accumulate them, saving the expense report between sessions, or enter the expenses in one sitting, then preview how the final report looks. Once the employee is satisfied all the expenses are entered properly, they can submit it for approval.

Advance payments

Accounting staff may also issue an advance payment before the employee creates an expense report. For example, a new hire will incur a large moving expense. You apply the advance payment to the "bill" after the employee incurs the expense and submits an expense report.

Expense report details

The expense reports themselves contain unlimited line items, each of which can specify different expense types, departments, and locations. Employees can also add notes in addition to the mandatory data, such as expense type and cost. Finally, employees can add attachments to their expense reports. Receipts, for example, can be scanned and attached so that employees in New York can instantly submit an expense report to their manager in California.

Expense types

Instead of account numbers or account labels, using expense types provide methods for:

1. Giving those General Ledger accounts used for employee expense reports more recognizable names.
2. Restricting access to those accounts you do not wish your employees to access.

   For example, you would not want employees to post expenses to an equity account, so you restrict access by not creating an expense type for that account.

You can assign one or more expense types to any General Ledger account. For example, the car mileage account is "7216 Transportation." However, to make it faster to recognize the expense type might be just "Mileage."

Expense payment types

You can use expense payment types to track how expenses were paid for. Expense payment types can be created for both non-reimbursable and reimbursable expenses. For example, you can create expense payment types for company credit cards or checks for non-reimbursable expenses. You can also assign a specific offset account to each expense payment type for easy reconciliation.

You can assign expense payment types to expense reports and expense adjustments.

Reports

Application reports include the expense ledger, check register for employee expenses, and the employee list.

An optional Client Expense Reporting solution is available for professional services companies with more sophisticated expense reporting requirements. This application includes expense bill-back, project expense tracking, and PDA support, among other features.

The life cycle of reimbursement requests and delivered payments

Reimbursement requests and delivered payments go through various states during the course of their life cycle. You may only be able to perform certain actions at certain points of their life cycle.