Add Expenses to an Expense Report
Before an expense report can be submitted within ExpensePoint™, it must include associated expenses. Expenses are the individual items or transactions that constitute the content of an expense report. These expenses can include receipts, invoices, or records of business-related costs incurred by the user. The expenses are compiled within the report to provide a comprehensive overview of the user's spending for reimbursement, accounting, or auditing purposes.
To add Expenses to an Expense Report, you must Create an Expense Report first.
There are several ways you can create an expense:
- Manually
- Through a transaction
- Through a scanned receipt
The method described below will cover the creation of manual expenses.
If the expense report has already been created, select it from the Expense Reports section.
Once you click on it, the navigation bar will display all available options for the selected expense report, including Add New Expense.
Click on the Add New Expense option from the Entry Tasks navigation menu on the left side of your workspace. The report window will open with the necessary details to be filled in for the corresponding expense.
The Expense details can include:
- Date Incurred
- Category
- Vendor
- Payment Type
- GL Code
- Project
- Personal Expense
- Description
- Notes
- Units
- Cost Per Unit
- Currency
- Exchange
- Taxes
- Receipt Total
- Total
See the details below to learn more about each field:
Date Incurred - add the date when the expense occurred. If you are creating an expense from a scanned receipt, this would match the date read from it.
Category - From the drop-down list, select the category to which this expense belongs. If you still need to set up any Categories, contact your administrator. If you have appropriate permissions, click here to learn more about setting up the Categories.
Vendor - Once you select the category, this field will ask you to enter the establishment's name, provider, agency, etc., depending on your chosen category. Select the vendor/company name from the drop-down section. This field may require selecting pre-approved vendors from the vendor's list per the chosen category. However, if you still need to set up the pre-approved vendor, you may manually input the vendor's name.
Payment Type -Select from the list of Payment Types approved by your company. In most cases, the selection for this field will be set to Employee Paid. If you are a cardholder of a corporate card or an ExpensePoint™ card or paid out of pocket for a business expense, you may need to choose a different option from the dropdown field. Learn more about the Payment Types.
GL Code - Enter or select the GL Code for this expense. Sometimes, the GL Codes will be preselected depending on your chosen category in the above field. Similarly, the GL Codes can also be preselected for your user account.
This field requires you to set up the GL Codes before creating an expense in your expense Report. If you do not have them set up before creating an expense, you will get an error:
Note: You can either request your administrator to configure the GL (General Ledger) settings, allowing you to create expenses for expense reports, or explore how to do it yourself with the appropriate permissions.
Project - Your administrator could disable or predefine this list. You can learn more about Projects.
Note: If you do not have any Projects set up, you can contact your administrator or click here to learn more about creating one if you have appropriate permissions.
Personal Expense - check this box if the expense is a personal expense. Personal Expenses will not be reimbursed. If you have used the corporate credit card for a personal expense, the system will flag it, necessitating reimbursement to the company.
Receipt checkbox/ Enter Reason - This checkbox is auto-checked, suggesting you already have the receipt. If you don't get a receipt, you can just simply go ahead and enter the reason for the missing receipt in the required Enter Reason field.
Note: The receipt included a checkbox; if checked, the system cannot validate if it is true or not; it is up to the approver to check. If the user unselected this field, they are required to enter a reason for the missing receipt. For the approver, to check quickly if the receipt is attached, the to the Receipt column is to the far right in the expenses table. You might need to decrease the receipts section by resizing your workspace.
Description - by clicking on this field, a window will pop up for longer form text for your convenience to add the details of the Business Purpose.
Note: If you see a different label for this or other fields, it might be because your organization modified some of these labels. You can enter the corresponding information as suggested by the field label.
Notes - by clicking on this field, a window will pop up for longer form text for your convenience so you can write some notes for this expense. For some categories, this field will display, e.g., a List of attendees where you would need to list the people that joined you, e.g., for lunch.
Units - enter the quantity of our expense line item. For some categories, this field will display e.g. the number of attendees.
Cost Per Unit – enter the cost of the expense per single item.
Currency - your default currency will be pre-selected in this field, but you can change it if your expense is in another currency. Select the necessary currency from the drop-down list from this field.
Exchange - if the expense was in a different currency, the Exchange Rate field will display the rate of exchange for the selected currency as per the XE.com license.
Taxes - select the tax type applied to your expense according to receipt. If you need it, you can choose multiple options. Learn more about how to set up the taxes, or ask your administrator.
Receipt Total - the total amount for this expense line item.
Total – the total amount of the receipt. Please note that the receipt total and the total amounts could be different in scenarios where, for example, you left a tip on top of the receipt total in a restaurant.
Important! If any information from the Units to Total fields is modified, all the related fields will also change.
As soon as all the required information is entered, you may save it by clicking on the Save button from the upper menu of the window.
To add comments to this expense, you may click on the Comments button to add more details.
The comments will be automatically saved to your expense.
If this is the first time you create an expense, as soon as you Save the expense, the navigation menu will change to reflect the actions you can do on an expense. Otherwise, you can access this menu in the Expense Manager by clicking on any expense belonging to an expense report.
