Handling Expense Reimbursements

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1Before you start

A claim’s Employee field is a real link to an HR employee record, not free text — the dropdown is built from HR‘s own employee list, and choosing “+ Create New Employee…” creates a real HR record on the spot.

Once an employee is selected, their name and email are snapshotted from the real HR record at save time — editing the claim later doesn’t let you override those with different text.

2Log a claim

Click + New Expense Claim (or the equivalent action on the Expense Reimbursements page). Fill in the claim header:

Then add at least one Claim Line — description, category, merchant, the real Chart-of-Accounts Account Code this line should post against, a receipt reference, and the amount. A line can optionally link to a Project (for cost rollup) or mark itself Bill to Client (see Passing a cost through to a client). Click Add Line for more than one.

Click Create Claim. Subtotal, tax, and grand total are computed automatically from the lines and Tax Rate.

3Approve a claim

Open the claim, change Status to Approved, and set Approved Total — leave it at 0 to approve the full grand total, or enter a lower figure for a partial approval (it’s automatically capped at the grand total either way). Click Update Claim.

If your company uses double-entry accounting, this is also the moment a real GL journal posts — automatically, the first time a claim reaches Approved, guarded so it never posts twice even if you edit the claim again later:

Each line debits the real expense account picked on it, not one lump “expenses” bucket. If you approve less than the full claimed amount, every line’s debit is scaled down proportionally so the journal still balances to the real Approved Total. Nothing has left your bank account yet — this only records that you owe the employee.

4Reimburse a claim

This is the step that actually moves money — a real bank transaction, not just a status change.

On an Approved claim, click Record Reimbursement. You’ll set:

• Paid From Bank Account — required.
• Date — defaults to today.
• Method — e.g. “Bank Transfer” (optional, overrides the claim’s Payment Method for display).
• Note — optional.

Click Record Reimbursement. This pays out the claim’s Approved Total as a real outflow bank transaction and posts its own GL entry:

The claim’s status moves to Reimbursed — the only way it can get there. Trying to set Reimbursed directly from the Status dropdown on an ordinary edit doesn’t work; the claim is quietly kept at Approved instead until you actually run this action.

Common tasks

Rejecting a claim

Not going to pay a claim out?

Open it and set Status to Rejected, then save. Rejected claims are excluded from the “Total Claimed” KPI and never get a GL journal (unless one was already posted from a prior Approved state — rejecting after approval doesn’t reverse that journal automatically).

Approving only part of a claim

Someone claimed $200 but only $150 of it is legitimate?

Set Status to Approved and Approved Total to $150 instead of leaving it blank. The GL journal (see step 3) recognizes exactly $150 as the liability, with each line’s debit scaled down proportionally — and reimbursing the claim later pays out that same $150, not the original $200 claimed.

Passing a cost through to a client

An employee bought something on a specific client’s behalf — hosting for their project, a part for their job — and you want to bill it back to that client rather than absorb it?

On the claim line, set Bill to Client to the real customer it should be passed through to (this is what actually makes a line “billable” — there’s no separate toggle). From then on, that line is available to be pulled onto a real Sales invoice via that customer’s “+ Add Billable Costs” picker. Once it’s been pulled onto an invoice, the line is marked invoiced and its Bill to Client field locks — it can’t be double-billed or reassigned to a different customer afterward.

Reference

Claim statuses

Rejected is a separate, terminal status reachable from Draft, Submitted, or Approved at any point via the Status dropdown — it doesn’t sit on this line since a claim doesn’t pass through it on the way to being paid.

What this module doesn’t do