Getting Started with Expense Claims

HR Partner allows employees to enter expense claims on their portal, which can then be approved by Admin users, Direct Supervisors, and other Employees.  You can also print reports on expense claims to be sent to your accounting department or for reimbursement payments.

Turning the Expense Tracking Module On / Off

The Expense Tracking Module can be turned on or off by each company to suit their requirements. By default, all new HR Partner companies will automatically have the Expense Tracking Module turned on if they sign up for either Premium or VIP subscriptions.

To turn the Expense Tracking Module on or off for usage, go to Setup > Company Info. Continue towards the bottom of the screen to the Additional Modules section. There, you'll find a checkbox for the Expense Tracking Module. 

Expenses can be tracked in different currencies. For example, you may have employees based in the US who need to track expenses in US Dollars, while employees in India may need to track their expenses in Rupees.  By default, the system will use the currency settings based on the specific location of each employee.  However, if you want to track all expenses using the company's default currency for ease of management, simply tick the "Use Company currency settings instead of Location specific currency settings" checkbox.

From this page, you can also enable the usage of Project and Cost Codes on expense claims, as well as turn on Enhanced Expense Claim Approval Rules.

Expense Categories

Before you can start tracking expenses, you will need to set up some Categories against which your employees can allocate their expenses.  Examples might include things such as "Meals," "Hotels," or "Fuel," etc.  You can create as many or as few categories as you like.

To set up expense categories, go to Expenses > Configure > Categories.

In the top right corner, you can select "Add Expense Category" to add new categories, or select the "Edit" or "Delete" icons next to each category to make changes to existing categories.

You have the option of entering a Cost Code against each category if you wish. This is purely optional, and you may want to do this to make things easier for your accounting department if they have to allocate the costs against any General Ledger codes in your financial system.

Setting Default Categories

By default, when your employees go to enter an expense claim, they will be presented with a blank line where they can choose an expense category from a drop-down menu. If needed, they can also add more lines for additional expense claims.

Instead of the default blank line, some companies may prefer a particular set of categories to appear automatically for ease of use, which is also possible.  For example, if a company has a field sales team who are frequently travelling, they may want 'Meals' and 'Fuel/Mileage' to appear as default categories for all employees, which would save data entry time while also ensuring that expense claims are correctly submitted.

To do this, in the left-hand menu, select Expenses > Configure > Categories. Select the edit icon next to the expense category you would like to set as default, and check the "Default" box.  If you would like to set multiple defaults, you can also set the "Default Order" in these categories that should be displayed.

Entering Claims

Employees can see instructions here on Submitting Expense Claims.

The Expense Claim Report

When needed, you can create a report based on Expense Claims. Just go to Reports > Printed, and select the "Expense Claims" Report under the Operations/Finance & Other section. Once you're in the Report, you can enter the filters for the report to get the results you need. Aside from the commonly used printed and CSV export options, you can also select Download Attachments to gather all submitted receipts. This can be helpful if you need to see all receipts that were attached to the claims for a certain date range, as it will give you a zip file of all those receipt attachments.