Module · Expenses

Where to find it in the app

• Use it: Finance → Expenses
• Turn it on/off: your business name (top-left) → Settings → Modules → Finance → Expenses

Plan: Solo and Business · Module group: Finance · Navigation: Finance → Expenses

1. Overview

Purpose. Every dollar going out of the business in one place: the supplier invoices you still owe, and what your team spent and is owed back. Kept with the supplier, the date, the amount and any GST, and exported for your bookkeeper or accountant.

There are two kinds of record here, and the screen names them.

• A bill is a supplier invoice you owe and have not paid: the internet bill, the insurance renewal, a tradesman's invoice on 30 day terms. It has a due date, it shows under To pay until you mark it paid, and it is the answer to "what do I owe this month".
• An expense is money already spent. Either the business paid it (a subscription on the company card, something out of petty cash) or a team member paid it themselves, in which case they are out of pocket and the claim sits as "to reimburse" until you pay them back.

The screen is in two halves. The top is what needs doing: To pay, Owed back to the team, Awaiting approval, each with the one button it needs. All records underneath is the whole history, for looking something up.

If you are the only person in the business, set When does a claim need approval? to Never in Settings → Invoicing & tax → Expenses, and what you enter is recorded straight away with no approval step to click through.

This is different from a purchase order, which is raised before you buy and sent to a supplier. A purchase order is not money owed yet, because the price you ordered at is not always the price you get invoiced, which is why orders stay under Finance → Invoicing. When the invoice for one arrives, record it here as a bill.

1-i. What do I owe? Bills to pay

Recording a bill. Either press Record a bill on this page, or forward the invoice to your receipts address and press File it on it. The first thing the form asks is Is this paid yet?

Choosing Not yet takes one question away rather than adding one: "How was it paid" disappears, because a supplier invoice comes out of the business account, and a Due date takes its place. Leave the due date empty if the invoice does not say one; nothing is invented.

We suggest which it is from your own record with that supplier. "Every other invoice from Superloop was already paid." That is what you did last time, not a guess, and it is yours to change. With nothing to go on we start on Not yet, because a bill recorded by mistake sits in To pay where one click fixes it, while an unpaid invoice filed as already paid disappears and nothing chases it.

Reading the To pay list. Soonest first, and each one wears its due date rather than its status: Overdue by 3 days, Due today, Due in 5 days, Due 30 September. "Approved" is true of a bill nobody has paid and tells you nothing you can act on, which is how an invoice quietly goes three weeks past its terms.

Bills to pay at the top of the screen is what they come to, with the late part named under it: "one of them is overdue, $220.00."

Paying one. Press Mark paid, check the date the money left and add a reference if you want one (a cheque number, a BPAY receipt). It stops counting as owed from that moment.

On a cash basis, an unpaid bill claims no GST back yet, and the BAS worksheet says so rather than leaving the figure quietly low. The credit belongs to the quarter you actually pay it in. On an accrual basis it is claimed from the invoice date. See Accounting & reports for which basis you are on.

1a. Receipts by email

Most receipts arrive in your inbox, not on paper. Your business gets its own private email address, shown in the Receipts inbox panel at the top of Finance → Expenses. Anything you forward there is kept with the sender, the subject and the date it arrived, ready to become a claim.

The way to use it properly is a rule, not forwarding by hand. Set one rule in your own email (Outlook, Gmail, whatever you use) so that anything from a supplier, or with "invoice" or "receipt" in the subject, is forwarded to that address automatically. After that you never think about it again. Nothing about your own email changes and we never see your mailbox.

What happens to an email that arrives:

• It has a PDF or a photo on it. The file is saved and the email appears in the inbox as waiting. Press File it, answer Is this paid yet?, type the amount off the receipt, and it becomes an expense with the file already attached.
• It has nothing we can use (no attachment, or only a calendar invite or a signature image). It still appears, under Earlier arrivals, with a line saying why it was not kept. Nothing that arrives is ever thrown away silently.

Setting up the rule asks for a code. Most email providers will not forward to an address until you prove you control it, so they send a short confirmation code to it. That email has no attachment, so it appears under Earlier arrivals as not kept. Press What it said on it and the code is there. Type it back into your email provider and the rule saves.

Three things worth knowing:

• Read the receipt for me shows the attached PDF or photo to the AI and fills in the total, the GST, the date and the supplier from what is printed on it. It uses one AI credit each time. It fills the form in; it never files anything, and it leaves a field blank rather than guessing, so check what it put in before you press File it. An Apple HEIC photo cannot be read this way, and it will say so rather than fail quietly.
• The amount is never filed without a person. Whether you typed it or the reader suggested it, somebody presses the button, because that figure becomes money in your books and goes into your BAS worksheet.
• What it said reads the message from your mail service the moment you press it, and keeps nothing. Use it when you want to know what an email contained, especially one we could not keep a file from. Nothing about an email's contents is stored, because a forwarded email can hold anything and a receipts list is not the place for your correspondence.
• The address is a private one, so treat it like a password. If it ever ends up somewhere it should not, press New address and the old one stops working immediately. Remember to update your forwarding rule when you do.

You need the Approve expenses permission to see the inbox or file from it. Receipts by email has to be switched on for the platform, so if the panel says it is not available, that is at our end and not something in your settings. The same goes for an arrival that says the mail service cannot read incoming mail: tell us and we will fix it, there is nothing to change in your own settings.

1a-i. The same receipt twice

Forwarding one invoice twice makes two arrivals, because they are two different emails. It happens without anybody being careless: a forwarding rule plus a manual forward, a supplier who emails the invoice and then a reminder carrying the same PDF, two mailboxes forwarding, or somebody re-sending because they were not sure the first one worked. File both and that purchase is in your purchases CSV twice and in 1B on your BAS worksheet twice.

So three checks run, and each says how sure it is:

The invoice number is read off the document by Read the receipt for me, and you can type or correct it in the Invoice number box before you file.

Nothing is ever blocked or thrown away. A business can buy the same thing twice for the same price on the same day, and only you know whether it did. The warning sits above the buttons and you decide.

A claim entered by hand gets the same treatment: attach the same file again, or enter the same supplier, date and amount, and the form says so before you submit. A staff member is only ever compared against their own claims, so a warning can never tell them about a colleague's.

1a-ii. Whose money was it? A staff receipt or a business invoice

The whole reimbursement side of this module turns on one answer: how it was paid. Someone is owed it back means a person fronted the money and will be reimbursed. The business paid and Petty cash mean it is being recorded for the books and nobody is owed anything.

No receipt can tell you which. A Bunnings docket and a Domain renewal invoice are identical on the point: a tax invoice names the buyer, which is your business either way, and never says whose card was tapped. So the reader does not guess it, and the form does three things instead.

It starts where it usually belongs. A claim entered by hand starts at someone is owed it back, because the person filling it in is normally the person who paid. A receipt that arrived by email starts at the business paid, because a forwarded supplier invoice usually is.

Then it uses your own history. Type a supplier you have claimed from before and it says so, and sets the answer to match: "Every other claim from Bunnings was money someone was owed back." That is your record, not a guess, and you can change it. Once you touch the choice yourself, nothing moves it again.

And it says what you are about to record, right above the button: "This records that someone is owed $27.80 back, and it will show under Owed, to pay." If your choice contradicts every previous claim from that supplier you get one line of doubt, never a block: "Every other claim from Zoho Australia was the business paying. Worth checking somebody really is owed this one."

Why this gets its own paragraph. Filing a staff member's receipt as the business paid means they never appear under Owed, to pay and nobody is told. The claim looks complete, your purchases CSV is correct, and they are quietly out of pocket.

1b. Giving the whole year to your accountant

The receipts are kept here and they are also downloadable in bulk. In Finance → Accounting & reports, under Purchases (bills), The receipts themselves hands you one zip of every receipt in the dates you set, each file named by date, supplier and amount, with an index inside listing them.

That is the answer to "my accountant wants the financial year": set From 1 July and To 30 June, download the purchases CSV for the figures, and download the receipts for the documents behind them. See 7g-i in Accounting & reports.

1c. Finding a record, and reading the ledger

All records is the bottom half of the screen: everything on file, including the ones in the groups above it, for looking something up.

Pick a financial year first. The chips are the years you actually have records in, 1 July to 30 June, the same period your accounting export uses and the one your accountant asks for. It opens on this year, because at a few hundred receipts a year a list of everything is a very long page. All years is there when you want it.

Then it is in spending order, newest first, grouped by month, with what each month came to and the GST in it. A supplier you pay every month then reads as a series rather than as unrelated rows scattered through the list.

The year picker only touches this half of the screen. To pay, Owed back to the team, Awaiting approval and the three figures above them are always for every year, because work waiting on you is a fact about the business and not about a view of it.

It is ordered by the date on the receipt, not the day somebody typed it in. Enter three old bills today and they land in the months they belong to.

The search box takes one thing and looks everywhere on the row: the supplier, what it was for, the category, who spent it, the invoice number, the amount and the month. Type superloop and you get every Superloop bill with the answer most people are actually after: "3 claims matching superloop, $315.15 altogether." Type more words to narrow it, so superloop august finds the one.

Amounts match as you read them off a statement: 105 finds $105.05.

And the search at the top of every screen (the magnifying glass, or ⌘K) now finds expenses too, beside your invoices and purchase orders. One search for a supplier shows both sides of the relationship: what you ordered from them and what you spent with them.

A staff member searching only ever finds their own claims, in either search box. Seeing everyone's needs the Approve expenses permission.

2. How a staff member submits a claim

A team member opens My work and finds the My expenses card (they can also use Finance → Expenses and the New claim button). They enter:

• the amount and the date they spent it,
• a category (from your editable list) and a short note about what it was for,
• how it was paid (their own card or cash, the company card, or petty cash),
• and they can attach a photo of the receipt.

When they submit, the claim either goes straight through or waits for a manager, depending on your approval rule (below).

3. Approving and reimbursing

Managers (anyone with the Approve & reimburse expenses permission) see claims under Finance → Expenses. The Awaiting approval filter shows what needs a decision. For each claim you can:

• View the receipt (opens a secure, short-lived link),
• Approve or Decline (with an optional reason). The person who submitted it is emailed the outcome.
• For an approved claim that was paid on a personal card, Mark reimbursed once you have paid them back, with an optional reference (for example the bank transfer or pay-run note).

The Owed back to staff figure at the top is the total of approved personal-card claims that have not yet been reimbursed.

Two-step sign-off (optional). If your business has turned on two-step approvals, a claim that needs approval takes two steps: a manager confirms it first, then a Payroll Officer does the final sign-off that releases the reimbursement. A claim mid-way shows "Awaiting payroll sign-off". (An approver who submits their own claim skips straight to the payroll step, their submit is the manager check.) See Approvals & payroll sign-off. With it off (the default), approval is a single decision, as above.

4. Settings

Under Settings → Invoicing & tax → Expenses you control:

• When a claim needs approval: never, only over a set dollar amount, or always. This works the same way as the purchase order approval rule.
• Expense categories: add or remove the categories staff choose from. These are seeded with sensible defaults and are fully editable.

5. Permissions

• Submit & track own expenses lets a team member add claims and see their own. Staff have this by default.
• Approve & reimburse expenses lets a manager see everyone's claims, approve or decline them, and mark them reimbursed. Managers and supervisors have this by default.

6. Privacy

Receipts are held in private storage and are only ever opened through a short-lived secure link after a permission check, never a public URL. A staff member can see their own claims and receipts; approvers can see the team's.

Related: Approvals & payroll sign-off · Invoicing (purchase orders) · Roster & timesheets