Expenses
An expense is money someone spent on a job: a taxi, a stock photo, a print run, a flight. My expenses in the sidebar is where everyone claims, and it is open to every member with the expense permission, not only to Finance.
Finance must be turned on. See Finance Setup.
Claim an expense
Section titled “Claim an expense”Choose New expense, or drop a receipt onto the page. Runnit reads the receipt in the background and offers what it found, field by field, with how confident it is. Accept a value or type over it. Nothing is submitted, approved or paid off the back of a receipt: reading it only ever suggests.
The form asks for:
| Field | Notes |
|---|---|
| Merchant, date, description | The basics |
| Category | Chooses the tax treatment and where the cost lands |
| Project and budget line | Where the cost belongs |
| Amount and tax | Includes tax or Excludes tax, with the tax rate |
| Paid with | My own money, a Company card or a Company account. Only your own money is reimbursed |
| On-charge | Charge this to the client, with a markup as a percentage or an amount |
| Split | One expense across several budget lines by share, which must total 100% |
Two special kinds have their own sections:
- Mileage: enter the distance and Runnit values it at the statutory rate for the claim’s date and freezes that rate on the claim. If the rate for your jurisdiction has not been confirmed yet, the claim is blocked and says so rather than guessing.
- Per diem: the days, the location and the salary band.
Mileage and per diem claims must use the statutory rate’s currency. Choose that currency before saving; this calculation does not convert the rate.
Fixed markup is shared only by the billable splits, including on a zero-cost claim. Non-billable splits add no client charge. The claim total agrees with its lines, and foreign-currency split values keep their rounding remainder.
A category marked as a disbursement passes the amount through at cost with no markup and no outgoing tax, because you are paying it as the client’s agent.
Save draft keeps it. Submit sends it for approval, and after that the claim can no longer be edited.
Status
Section titled “Status”An expense carries four independent statuses, so you can always tell what is true:
| Axis | Values |
|---|---|
| Approval | Draft, submitted, approved, rejected |
| Billing | Not billable, unbilled, held for an invoice, invoiced, credited |
| Payment | Company paid, awaiting reimbursement, in a run, reimbursed |
| Accounting | Not synced, synced, sync failed |
Policy notes
Section titled “Policy notes”After you submit, Runnit checks the claim and shows what it found: a possible duplicate of the same supplier, amount and date; a total that does not match the receipt; a date outside the project’s dates; a missing receipt over the threshold; a mileage claim over the annual cap. Some notes are warnings and some block the claim, and each says which.
Approving
Section titled “Approving”Approvers work from the Approvals inbox or from the expense itself: approve, reject with a reason, or move the expense to a different budget line. Approved expenses count as cost on the budget, and an approved billable expense joins Uninvoiced work ready to on-charge.
Unapproving an approved expense reverses its cost. An expense that is already in a reimbursement run cannot be unapproved.
Getting reimbursed
Section titled “Getting reimbursed”Money you spent yourself is paid back through a reimbursement run. See Paying Suppliers and People.
Next step
Section titled “Next step”Order work from suppliers: Purchasing.
Help from Ru
Section titled “Help from Ru”Ask Ru to explain this workflow, inspect records you can access, or carry out supported steps when you authorise them. Your permissions and approval rules still apply. See Finance with Ru.
Approved expenses add their client charge to budget used and their purchase cost to budget cost. Unapproving a claim removes those amounts until it is approved again. Recorded currency values stay in place when exchange rates change. See budget burn.