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- Expense Reporting System
- Features
- Expense capture
Expense capture
Expense capture brings each business purchase into a report with its purpose, category and supporting evidence. Employees create their own expense reports and add expense lines for out-of-pocket spending, company-card transactions, mileage or per-diem claims. The payment method matters from the first entry: a company-card charge belongs to the company’s liability, while an eligible employee-paid claim may need reimbursement. A draft gives the employee space to correct the details before requesting approval.
OverviewReports Awaiting My Approval×
Expense Reporting System · Expense capture
New
Reports Awaiting My Approval
Business-purpose approval waits for the manager
| Report number | Submitter | Report title | Report date | Total amount | Violation count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ER-50134 | Devon Clarke | Denver client workshop travel | 15 Oct | 37,454.05 | 32 | |
| ER-94429 | Marcus Bell | May regional sales visits | 12 Oct | 10,498.13 | 40 | |
| ER-77463 | Ibrahim Diallo | Quarterly planning offsite | 04 Nov | 29,084.09 | 28 | |
| ER-59471 | Marcus Bell | Field service trip to Reno | 14 Oct | 10,599.82 | 14 | |
| ER-29956 | Camila Ortega | Supplier audit in Spokane | 13 Oct | 38,409.87 | 24 |
6 of 6 records
Denver client workshop travelExpense reports · ER-50134
SubmittedSubmitterDevon Clarke
Report date15 Oct
Total amount37,454.05
Violation count32
What you can do
Capture the evidence while it is available
Receipts retain the uploaded image, PDF or forwarded email and the OCR result. Parsed merchant, date and amount can help fill an empty line, but the original file remains the evidence. A low-confidence or failed extraction returns to the employee for confirmation. Check the expense date, currency, business purpose, category and project together. A clear image does not prove that the purchase is eligible, and the same receipt cannot support another claim for the same cost. Retain the receipt association when a reviewer requests a correction.
Separate employee claims from company spending
Expense lines record the approved amount and payment method for each item. Company-card transactions connect to their imported issuer identity, preventing the employee from claiming those charges again. Mileage and per-diem entries retain their own approved calculation basis and are included in employee-payable amounts when eligible. Itemization must preserve the original total and distinguish any personal portion. A line’s category suggests its account code; Finance reviews coding changes before financial handoff. Project references provide costing context without creating another project or customer invoice in this system.
Submit a stable report for a real decision
Before submission, the policy check identifies missing evidence, required explanations and blocked items. The employee resolves those findings within the applicable policy rather than editing an approval result. Submission records a version of the report and requests the manager decision. Material changes after that point require recall or a returned report and a new revision, with previous decisions retained. Employees can follow their submitted work without changing a reviewer’s action. The report number, original evidence and decision history remain connected through rejection, clarification and resubmission.
What your team sees
- My Drafts. Open the related work within your assigned scope.
- My Submitted. Open the related work within your assigned scope.
What it keeps track of
Data model- Expense reports
- The submitter’s report header. One report aggregates many expense lines for a single trip, project, or pay period. Lifecycle: Draft → Submitted → approved by mgr → approved by finance → Reimbursed; with branches Held and Rejected. Reimbursed is set when the downstream Payroll or AP cycle confirms payment.
- Expense lines
- The line grain. One row per receipt / per per-diem day / per mileage trip. Carries the GL coding, project costing, approved amount (set by the approver — may differ from Amount when a partial disallowance applies), and payment method (out of pocket vs corporate card) that drives the reimbursement branch.
- Receipts
- The supporting documentation — phone snap, PDF, emailed receipt forwarded to a capture inbox. OCR runs on upload and backfills the parsed fields; the submitter (or auto-fill on high-confidence parse) writes the canonical values onto the expense line.
- Card transactions
- The daily transaction feed from the card program. One row per posted swipe / charge / refund. New rows land via the
card-transaction-feed-importworkflow withStatus: Unmatched; thecard-txn-to-expense-line-matchworkflow advances them toMatchedon a unique expense line pairing. - Mileage entries
- One row per business trip drive. Either the user enters From / To addresses and the
mileage-calculation-from-google-mapsworkflow computes Miles, or the user enters Miles directly with an odometer-style override. Calculated reimbursement uses the active mileage rates row for the entry date’s tax year. - Meals and entertainment
- The meals and entertainment classification log for tax review. One row per expense line where
Category.MealsAndEntertainment = true. Carries the attendee list and business purpose required for the deduction; drives the M&E memo on the GL posting and the M&E detail report.
Who uses it
Permissions- Employee
- Prepares and submits their own report.
- Cardholder
- Links their own issuer transactions.
- Manager
- Reviews direct reports.
- Finance Reviewer
- Verifies evidence and authorized amounts.
Set up Expense Reporting System your way.
Start free, then use Proto to change fields, steps and approvals before your team goes live.