Expenses

The Expenses module handles the two ways employees spend money for the company:

• Company card — the money already left a company account. The bank transaction is turned into an expense, the employee attaches the receipt, and approval books it properly.
• Personal reimbursement — the employee paid out of pocket. They submit the receipt, and once approved the reimbursement is paid out through the normal payment rails.

Two pages drive it: My Expenses (every user’s own queue) and Manage Expenses (the approver’s overview).

My Expenses#

Navigate to Cockpit → My Expenses. This page lists only your own expenses, in three tabs grouped by who owes the next step:

• Action needed — new expenses waiting for you to attach a receipt and describe the spend; expenses that failed AI processing (the error is shown); and expenses a manager rejected, with the reason — fix and resubmit, or delete.
• In progress — the AI is reading your receipt, the expense is waiting for a manager, or an approved reimbursement is waiting for its payout — it stays here until the money is actually paid out.
• Done — paid reimbursements and approved company-card expenses.

Submitting an expense#

1. Click New Expense (or open one from Action needed).
2. Choose the expense type — see below. Paid personally is preselected.
3. Attach the receipt — pick a file or use the camera button on your phone. PDF and photo formats are accepted; several photos of a multi-page receipt are cropped and combined into a single PDF for you to confirm. A receipt is expected on every expense: you’ll be asked to attach one before submitting.
4. Add a short description (required) and, if you like, a category (“Client Meals”, “Fuel”, “Office Supplies”, …) — left empty, the AI reads it from the receipt. Categories map to the correct ledger accounts behind the scenes, and your administrator curates the list (category names follow your language setting).
5. Amount, currency and date are read from the receipt by the AI; anything you type is only a starting point and is replaced by what the AI reads. With a foreign currency and a date set, an Exchange Rate field appears with the official rate for that date suggested; overwrite it if you need to.
6. Submit. The AI reads the receipt, drafts the transaction with the right account and VAT, and sends it for approval.

With line tax switched on for the dataset, personal and card expenses also offer an optional Tax code: pick the input-VAT account printed on the receipt and it is booked exactly so (the AI then uses it instead of choosing one); leave it empty and the account is chosen for you — or, when AI suggestions are on, the receipt is booked without VAT.

AI suggestions at upload#

Turn on AI suggestions for expenses in your profile (an administrator can do it for you under User Management) and the order flips: you first pick the expense type and add the receipt — photo or file — and while Reading your receipt… is shown the AI reads it and fills the form in: merchant, date, amount and currency, a short description, the category and the tax code. A banner says what to double-check — a tip on a card slip, two VAT rates on one receipt, a foreign currency the dataset does not have, a file you already filed — and you correct anything before you Submit. Because you confirmed the figures yourself, the expense is booked immediately from them, with the receipt attached, and goes straight to approval; nothing waits for background processing any more. A file that is not a receipt or invoice at all (a photo of an object, an unrelated screenshot) is refused with a note, and you can pick another one. Order confirmations, payment confirmations and banking-app screenshots do count: whatever they show is filled in, the rest you type. Closing the dialog before submitting discards the upload. Users without the setting keep the flow described above unchanged.

No receipt to attach? Tick No receipt available and the expense is booked directly from what you enter: Amount, Currency, Date and Tax become required (plus the exchange rate for a foreign currency), and a Notes field lets you explain the spend. Such an expense skips AI processing and goes straight to approval, where the manager sees a No receipt flag.

Attachments are supporting documents that are not the receipt — an itinerary, an event confirmation, or the proof behind a No receipt available claim. Add them under Attachments in the expense; they are never read by the AI, they are simply kept with the expense and copied onto the booked transaction, where the approver can open them. They are available whichever way you file the expense, so an expense submitted without a receipt can still carry documents. Remove one with the × next to its name while the expense is still yours to edit.

For company-card expenses the amount, currency and date come from the bank transaction and cannot be edited; the AI cross-checks your receipt against the bank amount (for a foreign-currency receipt, against the original amount quoted on the bank line) and flags mismatches for the approver.

Expense types#

The type decides where the document goes:

• Paid personally — you paid out of pocket and want the money back. This is the normal reimbursement described above.
• Paid with card — you paid with a company card and already have the receipt, but the card transaction has not been imported yet. Pick the card (shown as Card ending in 1234) and enter amount, currency and date — they are what the receipt is matched on. Save it and the expense waits under Action needed with an Awaiting card transaction badge. When the card payment is later imported, it is matched to your receipt automatically and continues on its own: nothing is booked twice, and if the receipt was already complete it goes straight to approval without you touching it again. The option only appears when a card is assigned to you (see Company-card expenses from the bank side).
• To be paid — the document is not your expense at all but a bill the company still has to pay (a supplier invoice you were handed, say). Attach it, optionally pick a category and add Additional instructions for AI processing — a hint on what the document is for — then Send to workflow. It goes into the normal accounts-payable workflow and lands on the workstation it would have reached by email or inbox upload, with your category and instructions passed along so the booking starts on the right account. No expense is created and nothing is expected back from you.

Ways an expense can reach your queue#

• You create it on this page (or from the My Expenses tab on the start page, which is optimised for phones).
• A company-card payment is assigned to you — manually from Bank Transactions or automatically by a bank rule (for example, everything paid with your card). It appears under Action needed.
• You email a receipt to your personal expense address (shown on the page). Only mail sent from your own account email is accepted; the attachment arrives as a new expense waiting for details.
• A card statement is imported — a company credit-card statement creates one expense per purchase for the cardholder (see Card Statements).

The My Rules button holds your personal category rules: when a card-statement line contains a text you define (merchant name or card category — “DHL”, say), your expense arrives with that category already set; you can always change it. When saving a new rule you can apply it to your open card expenses without a category in one go.

Your payout details (personal reimbursements)#

The first time you submit a personal expense you’ll be asked for your payout details: first and last name, address (street name and house number separately, ZIP, city, country), and IBAN. They are stored on your central profile — independent of any dataset — and copied into your reimbursement vendor, named like “Anna Muster (Spesen)”, which the payment rails use to pay you. To complete or change the details later, use the Complete payout details button on the Payout details incomplete banner on My Expenses (or the Complete now notice on the start page) — saving there updates your reimbursement vendor automatically. Your profile page (Settings → My Profile) shows the same details, but editing it there alone does not carry changes over to an existing vendor.

If anything needed to pay you is missing, the My Expenses tab on the start page shows a “Payout details missing” notice with a Complete now link straight into your profile; once everything is in place the notice disappears. Bank details are deliberately minimal — IBAN plus an optional BIC/SWIFT for foreign accounts is all a payout needs.

Profile preferences for expenses#

On your profile page you can also set:

• Expenses first on mobile — on phones, the start page opens the Expenses tab directly instead of the dataset list, so snapping a receipt is one tap away.
• AI suggestions for expenses — the receipt is read the moment you add it and the expense form is filled in for you to check; the expense is booked from the details you confirm (see AI suggestions at upload). Off by default.
• Expenses dataset (shown once the option above is on) — the dataset preselected in the start page’s My Expenses tab, handy if you work in several datasets.

If either needs changing for a colleague, Support can set it for them.

Manage Expenses#

Navigate to Cockpit → Manage Expenses (requires the manage permission). The page follows the workflow in four tabs — Awaiting information, Needs approval, Awaiting payout, Settled — and opens on Needs approval, your work queue. Inside each tab a Company Expenses section holds the card spend, followed by one section per employee with reimbursements. Search, filters (status, user, type, category, date range) and per-section totals help you keep the overview; settled expenses older than 90 days stay hidden until you click Show history in the toolbar.

Rows carry warning badges where you should look twice: a receipt/bank amount mismatch, a Possible duplicate receipt, Payout details missing on the employee, Bank payment missing, or Stuck (AI processing that stalled).

Rows can be selected on Needs approval and Awaiting information — a selection stays within one section, so card spend and one employee’s reimbursements never mix. On Needs approval you can approve or reject the whole selection at once; on Awaiting information you can Send reminder, and Reset to draft appears for expenses marked Stuck to hand them back to the employee. Delete removes expenses together with their bookings — from the selection or from any row, at any stage, an approved or paid one included.

Deciding an expense#

For each pending expense you can open the transaction — review or adjust the drafted booking (account, tax, amount) before deciding — or reject it, which returns the expense to the employee with your reason (they are notified by email) and removes the draft booking. The employee can fix and resubmit, or delete it.

The transaction opens in the same tab and carries a Back to Manage Expenses link, so you keep your place in the queue; approving the expense from there brings you back to the list by itself.

Card receipts that were filed before their bank transaction carry an Awaiting card transaction badge, and once matched an Auto-matched badge when the import linked them by amount and date. Check the linked bank details before approving such an expense: Unmatch expense detaches a wrong link (the receipt goes back to waiting, the bank line becomes unmatched again), and the link icon on a waiting receipt lets you pick the right bank transaction yourself. The same corrections are available on Bank Transactions.

For a company-card expense, Approve books it in one step: the temporary holding entry on the transition account is replaced by the final booking, so the bank account is always correct — before and after.

For a reimbursement, approving always includes deciding how the money goes out — you choose a payout mode:

• Approve & Settle (the default) — books the payout from the Payment Account you choose and closes the expense in one step; the payment is booked on the transaction date. Use it when the reimbursement is paid outside the payment rails — in cash, say, or through your own e-banking.
• Approve + payment file — queues the payout in Bank Payments with the chosen Execution Date.
• Approve + pay out now — sends the payment immediately through an available rail (pain.001 download, Konfipay, Amnis, Revolut or Wise). You confirm the amount and recipient first — this moves real money. This mode is only offered when approving a single expense; batch approval offers the first two.

Reimbursements sent through a payment file or paid out directly flip to Paid automatically when the payout is matched on a bank statement. In between, the employee sees the payment stage on their own expense (“Payment created”, “Payment uploaded”).

Each employee section has a Send reminder action: it emails the user (in their language) about expenses waiting on them and missing payout details.

The Categories button manages the expense categories. The list starts with the standard categories — “Client Meals”, “Canteen”, “Fuel”, “Office Supplies” and so on. These are the same in every dataset, already mapped to the right accounts and kept up to date centrally. You can still adjust one for your dataset — a changed name, account or icon overrides the central default (the row is marked Modified, and Reset to Default undoes it) while everything you leave alone keeps updating — but they cannot be deleted; switch one off if it does not apply to your company. Below them you can add, edit, deactivate and delete your own categories for anything specific to this dataset.

Pending-approval notification#

Under Cockpit → Email Notifications, users with the manage-expenses permission can subscribe to a periodic Expenses pending approval email listing everything waiting for a decision. Notification types are tied to permissions in general — you can only configure (and keep receiving) a notification whose underlying data you are allowed to see; if the permission is revoked later, the emails stop automatically.

Company-card expenses from the bank side#

On Bank Transactions, any unmatched outgoing payment offers Create Expense: assign it to a user and it lands in their Action needed tab with the bank’s details attached, so they know what the payment was. Bank rules can hand payments over automatically — everything paid with one card, say. The mechanics on the bank side — including how the bank line stays locked until the expense is decided — are covered on that page.

When you create such a rule you can tick Card payment and record the card’s last 4 digits. The assigned user can then file receipts for that card before the payment arrives (“Paid with card”, above), and the import matches them automatically instead of creating a second expense. Matching requires the same user and card, an amount within 50 rappen, and a receipt date shortly before the booking. A purchase in a foreign currency is fine: file the receipt in its own currency (say USD 179.94) and the import matches it against the original amount the bank quotes on the CHF debit — or, when the bank quotes none, at the day’s exchange rate — and notes on the expense what was settled as what. Wrong or missing matches are corrected from either page: Unmatch expense and Change assigned expense on the bank row, or the same actions on Manage Expenses.

Notes#

• An expense’s draft transaction never appears in your reports until it is approved; for company-card spend the bank movement itself stays visible the whole time.
• Expense transactions are approved through the Expenses pages or the transaction editor, never through the workstation bulk actions, which will point you here. Opening one in the transaction editor shows which expense it belongs to; you can correct the booking there at every stage — pending, approved or paid — and every correction is recorded in the audit trail of both the transaction and the expense. A pending expense can be approved from that screen if you may approve expenses, or if your workstation approval rights cover the transaction’s amount. Deleting the transaction there deletes the expense with it (and vice versa on the Expenses pages) — whoever may delete the transaction may do so; the expense adds no restriction of its own. The same is true of the batch and workstation delete actions. A manager can delete an expense even while the AI is still reading its receipt: whatever the job posts is removed with it (employees can only delete their own expenses while they are new or rejected).
• Users need the expenses permission to see My Expenses, and the manage expenses permission for Manage Expenses; remember to add them to existing roles.