Creating and Managing Expense Categories - Payroll

The expense reimbursement process allows employers to pay back employees who have spent their own money for business-related expenses. When employees receive an expense reimbursement, typically they would not report such payments as wages or income. These types of reimbursable expenses occur when employees travel for work, but can come from other activities related to their employment, for example, certain purchases of work-related supplies or tools.

The Expense Category feature allows you to create a new expense category and include details such as the tax code, general ledger mapping code, tax rate and external ID. You can also use this feature to edit the information if it changes and delete a record that is no longer required.

A short video on this setup can be found here.

Add an expense category

1. On the Payroll dashboard, select Payrun settings > Expense categories
2. Click "Add".
   
3. Enter your chosen name of the new expense category
4. Enter an External Id for the expense category, if required.
5. Enter the General Ledger Mapping code
6. Enter the Tax Code - to cater for sales taxes that may be applied to expense claims. You’ll be able to manually type in the account code and tax rate to be included with your journal export.
7. Enter the Tax Rate
8. Click Save

Helpful Hint

If an external id is used that has been used before you won't be able to save it if the 'unique external Id' setting is switched on. This setting is located on the Payroll settings > Advanced settings page. See here for more information.

Helpful Hint

When adding new expense categories you cannot have multiple entries with the same tax code and different tax rates. This has been done to avoid issues with the incorrect rate being applied

Edit an expense category

1. To edit an expense category, click on the name of the category you want to edit.
2. This will expand the details of that category for editing.
3. Make the necessary changes.
4. Click Save.

Delete expense category

Helpful Hint

• Categories can be deleted as long as they are not associated with unfinalised pay runs, recurring employee expenses or pending or approved employee expense requests. Refer to the Draft Pay Run Audit report if you need to know which employees are impacted by an Expense category in an unfinalised pay run.
• We have now introduced the ability to delete used expense categories. Previously, you could only delete categories that had never been used. It is a feature that users have requested within the platform and so this is an exciting update. This does not affect historic data (expense requests, pay runs, reporting) and you can restore the category whenever needed using the restore deleted items function.
• Deleted categories won't be available to select when creating new expense requests. Deleted categories will be available in historic reporting and pay runs, as well as filters where applicable
• The API end points relating to pay runs, expense categories, expense requests and pay run inclusions have been updated to align with these same rules.

1. Click the Business Settings menu.
2. Click the Payroll Settings submenu.
3. Click on Expense Categories.
4. Hover your mouse over the category that you want to delete and click the red circled cross that appears.
5. Confirm Delete. 

Restore an expense category

1. Go to Payroll settings > Restore deleted items
2. Select Expense category from the drop down box
3. A list of all deleted expense categories will appear or you can search for them by name or ID. 
4. Click the 'Restore' option against the desired expense category.
5. Confirm Restore.