Expense claims shows in some cases suspense account

Hello!
There are something wrong. The case: Employee brings a bill. There are deductible costs and some (1-2) nondeductible costs. To keep all the bill in the same amount, im using expense claims account where i put nondeductible costs. So i can keep transparency and also taxoffice are happy.
After some updates, i can choose expense claims account but i cant choose there expense claims payer anymore.
Manager version 21.5.35

1 Like

Can you explain some more what the account 2170 Expense Claims is?

Perhaps show the edit screen of this account

Its the same account where all the expense claims are going, thats the built-in account!
And by the reports you can see the balance Expense Claims Summary.
2021-06-02 (4)

No line item on an expense claim should ever be posted to the Expense claims account. That account is (or should be, unless you created an ordinary account by that name) a liability account that records what the business owes the expense claim payer. All line items on the expense claim should be posted to appropriate expense accounts.

There is no need to try to “keep all the bill in the same amount,” because an expense claim does not record any monetary movement of company funds. It records only items paid with the payer’s personal funds that are paid on behalf of the company. The tax office will be happy as long as you can document that (a) the money was paid and (b) it was for a legitimate business expense.

OK, that’s a “inventive” way of accounting for non-business expenses.

I only add actually expenses of the business to an expense claim, so I never tried adding the Expense Claim/Payee to account for other expenses which do not belong in the business at all.

This was certainly possible before (in version 21.3.61 for example) and had the effect of adding a debit and a credit with identical amounts to the Expense Claim Clearing account.

Is this a bug or closing a loophole in the accounts?

but think also about it, when you need to check your documents and compare the amounts, then its very easy to check them, cos the posted amounts and the document amounts are always the same, in this cases you dont need to look it separatley when you see the differences, also when you take the report from general ledger, then you can also see very easely all this non-business expenses.
this situation are very common by the small companies

1 Like

Mister Tut! There arent any laws or some international suggestions as i know (US GAAP and also IFRS). The main princip of accounting are to be clear, so that everybody can understand what kind of postings have been made. And with so kind of transaction, everybody can understand, that there have been non business expenses and that the company havent put them to the costs.

I believe you are creating doubt rather than clarity. If you leave the non-business expenses off the expense claim, they will obviously not appear in your expense accounts. If you put them on the claim and then back them out, there could be confusion.

Idk what the developer’s intentions were. It could be to close a loophole, but the way @gunnar.michelson uses the expense claims in the lines is very intuitive and transparent as he said especially when you buy in bulk for work and personal purposes and you only get one receipt.

Anyway, I tried replicating this transaction as follows:

And this is the result I got:

I don’t know, but it seems like if you are able to select an account, it shouldn’t then default to suspense without you being able to select the Payer in the lines or have it prefilled with the payer selected for the whole expense claim.

If it isn’t a bug, it certainly appear buggy.

okey, but who will be confused? Normal people perhaps yes. We are talking about the people who know accounting. So every accountant knows that if you have liability account and if you post there something in the debit side you are reducing the balance

Many users of Manager with limited knowledge of accounting could be confused. And my experience with government auditors suggests some of them might not understand. I view the situation this way: a non-business expense that never appears in accounting records does not need explanation or understanding; one that does appear requires both.

@lubos will have to decide what he intended.

Tut! I absolutley respect your point of view. I also think that there are users who like to do sometning in different way. And that is what i like in Manager, you havent to be very conservative. Its also time for accountants to think out of the box. Specially in 21st century and IT era, there are no limits.

The last we want is for accountants to think outside the box!

It was thinking outside the box that brought about the Enron disaster and the Wirecard scandal. If the accountants had stuck to the box, these frauds would not have been possible.

:rofl: thats criminal, but to have more transparency, to decribe every row on the bill, that brings much more clarity, specially when you are doing fully digital accounting as we do it in Estonia

1 Like

I note that the ability to select an Accounts Receivable sub-account or to an Accounts Payable sub-account has been removed from Sales Invoice Line and Purchase Invoice Line.

So not having the possibility to post to the Expense Claim account on an Expense Claim is in line with this fairly recent change

Not if you only have a single receipt which contains both business and non business items as noted by @gunnar.michelson. By entering the expense claim detailing all items then you have a fully reconcilable transaction as the totals on both exactly match.

However if you only enter the business items within the expense claim, then you don’t have a reconcilable total and you also lose any internal cross checking controls. EG, if the receipt contains 5 business items but only 4 get entered onto the expense claim, then that error may never be detected, unless the expense claim payer is self auditing…

Besides, any transaction that can be recorded within a hand written ledger should also be able to be identically recorded within a computer written ledger. Increasingly that is no longer occurring within Manager, as it appears that the IT department within Manager is increasingly placing limitations / restrictions on data entry, even though such limitations / restrictions don’t even exist within accounting itself.

For the past 5 years or so, Manager has provided a very powerful and flexibility accounting software but in recent times it has started to erode those advantages, thankfully some erosions have been reversed.

Exactly, but unfortunately many accountants can’t function outside basic text book accounting. By now you have probably already sorted out a workaround via a clearing account.

just think, that all your documents are digitized and you need to find something but you dont remember the company name, you dont remember the amount, you just know one keyword. in this situations, its very important to enter all the items by the row.
in the past it was quite easy, you take the map, browsed the documents and there it is.

@gunnar.michelson, I do not understand your last comment. What can you find by your unorthodox posting of line items to the Expense claims liability account that you cannot find by entering an expense claim in the customary manner? You can search the Expense Claims tab’s list for your keyword if it appeared in a description. Or you can look at a General Ledger Transactions report for either Expense claims or the expense account to which the item would have been posted. In either, you could find your keyword if it was in a line description. These are the same options you have for any other transaction type.

I do not see how this justifies your “outside the box” accounting approach. Nor is it justification for the idea you brought up about separating non-business expenses in your business records. I repeat my earlier opinion: if you don’t put them in your business records, you don’t have to back them out and you don’t have to explain them. And there is nothing the least bit unusual about having documentation that includes expenses that are not listed in your business records. The only unusual thing would be listing expenses that you cannot document.

Because you haven’t fully considered @gunnar.michelson clearly made point:

That is, when the Supplier creates their Sales Invoice, a copy is lodged with the tax office.
Therefore when the Customer creates their Purchase Invoice / Expense Claim, a copy can also be lodged with the tax office. The totals match and all is happy.

However, if the Customer creates a Purchase Invoice / Expense Claim which only partly matches the Suppliers Sales Invoice then the tax office has a red flag.

Modern accounting needs to be much more than just recording conventional transactions it also has to cater for the increasing reporting requirements of tax authorities. @gunnar.michelson had meet that need via his well explained workflow which Manager had always permitted to occur, until the recent removal of such flexibilities via unnecessary account posting restrictions.

1 Like

Nothing was ever mentioned about lodging purchase invoices or expense claims with the tax office. @gunnar.michelson’s comments were all about internal reviews, comparisons, searches, etc. I know of no jurisdiction where purchase invoices or expense claims would be lodged with a tax authority. Do you? They might be examined during an audit, but not lodged for comparison with corresponding tax invoices (sales invoices).