Expense Claims and Approvals

HR Partner allows employees to enter expense claims on their portal, which can then be approved by Admin users.  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 individual requirements.  

By default all NEW HR Partner companies will automatically have the Expense Tracking Module TURNED ON, whereas EXISTING HR Partner Companies will have it TURNED OFF, until they decide to turn it on.

To turn on the Expense Tracking Module go to Setup > Company Info. Towards the bottom of the screen, there is a checkbox for Expense Tracking Module.  Ensure this is checked if you want to use the expense tracking feature, otherwise leave it unchecked.

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, you may want to track all expenses using the company default currency for ease of management.  If this is the case, simply tick the "Use Company currency settings instead of Location specific currency settings" checkbox.

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" or "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 menu on the left of your view select Expenses > Configure > Categories. Select the edit icon next to the expense category you would like so set as default, and check the "Default" box.  If you would like to set multiple defaults you can also set the "Default Order" that these categories should be displayed in.

Entering Claims

Employees can see instructions here on Submitting Expense Claims.

Viewing and Approving Expenses

Only Admin users that are set with permission to Approve Expense Claims will be sent expense claims to approve. This permission is set under  Setup > Users, in the users permissions under the "Tasks" tab. See here: 

To view all expense claims submitted by your employees, select Expenses > Requests from the menu on the left hand side of your admin portal.  This will show you a list of all submitted claims, and their statuses.

To approve, reject, or make changes to a claim, an Admin User can select the "Update" button to the right of it, which will take you to the view shown below. Please note this may only be done before an expense claim is approved. 

When in this screen, you can select the " Approved" or "Rejected" button to either accept or reject the claim.

Please note that if the "Reimbursement Amount" is going to be different from the claim amount, you will have to edit it here before clicking either button.

You can also click on any attachments here to check receipts or proof of claim that your employees may have uploaded.

If you have any queries about this claim, you can instantly send an email to the employee by clicking on the "Message Employee" button and typing a short message to them.

Reversing/Cancelling an Approved or Rejected Claim

If you are the company account owner (generally the person who created the HR Partner company), then you can revert an Approved or Rejected claim back to "Submitted" status again by clicking on "Un-Approve" or "Un-Reject". To revert a claim, you need to "view" it from the list of claims, then within the view screen, the main company admin will see this button in the lower left:

Clicking this will pop up a confirmation, and will revert the claim status back to "Submitted" again. 

This will enable the claim to be edited or even deleted by the employee via their portal (admin users can login as the employee to delete these if necessary).

Marking Expenses as Paid 

Once your accounting team have paid an expense claim, you can mark it as "Paid" in HR Partner by selecting Expenses > Requests, checking the box beside the relevant expense claims and then clicking on the arrow beside "Bulk Action" and selecting "Mark as Paid" as shown here:

Expense Claim Reports

Of course, you can also create a report based on Expense Claims too. Just go to Reports > Printed, and click on "Add a New Report" and choose the type "Expense". Then you can enter the filters for the report.