Paying Expense claims to employees

1

I have read the guide ( https://forum.manager.io/t/expense-claims/6898 ) and followed it to a tee and I think the workflow is correct, but I’m just not seeing as easy a workflow as I would be expecting.

For example:

  • the employee hands me the receipt
  • I create an expense claim for the employee
  • I can pay that by spending money from one of the cash accounts

What I’m expecting somewhere is to be able to pay an expense claim in much the same way as I pay an invoice and payslip. When spending/allocating the payment, the total field to be populated with the amount to be paid.

For example, if I check the employee clearing account, I can correctly see that I need to pay them their pay AND the amount of the unpaid expense:

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Clicking on the outstanding $411 brings up a nice list of payments to be made including the actual pay and expenses, but no way to process them either together or separately:

From the expenses tab, the unpaid expense is at the top. The second one in this list is for the same employee but has been previously taken care of.

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What I don’t see in the above though, is a way to quickly and easily determine which of those have and/or have not been paid.

Also, when I process their payslip, there appears to be nowhere to add their expenses and record it on there (maybe it’s not necessary, but a nice record of me paying them for that expense would be nice, if I could do it in the payslip, it would be nicer).

Opening any of the dropdowns doesn’t allow me to add unpaid expenses:

Back in the expense claim area there’s nowhere to create a spend money to pay it, something that auto-populates with the correct amount (or amounts if more than one) would again be nice. Much like when paying an invoice:

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What I resorted to was in the processing of the payslip and just adding an extra line item, which is just another Employee Clearing Account item. However, it doesn’t appear as an expense to be paid, or payslip item.

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What could possibly assist is a further classification after the employees name for each of the payment areas that may apply, such as unpaid expenses, unpaid payslips, and whatever else can be attributed to employees. Unlike an invoice, there’s no way to attach and pay a single expense item. This is from an invoice, but how I’d like to see the employee clearing side of things:

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I’m pretty confident I’ve handled it all correctly, I’m just looking for a slightly easier way to manage it without the possibility to make a mistake when transferring an amount between screens.

As a final note to what has turned into a long post (very sorry about that), I don’t quite understand the difference in dealing with payslips and expenses when compared to invoices. Shouldn’t they really be much the same? When a pay slip is paid, it would be nice to have an indication on the payslip that this has been processed (like a purchase invoice has the new balance at the bottom and a sales invoice has a Paid in Full stamp). It’s easy enough to reverse, but I have processed the same persons pay twice before (luckily in the online banking it had come up with the same reference that I’d paid it the day before).

I’m open to any workflow suggestions.

2

You’re doing everything correctly. But I think you misunderstand the philosophy. Both expense claims and payslips create liabilities to someone (in your example, both someones are the employee). And both post to Employee clearing account. You don’t “pay” an expense claim or a payslip. You pay the liability to the employee in the Employee clearing account. When you want to know the status of obligations to an employee, that’s where you check, not in some source transaction.

That’s because the payslip only creates a liability. The expense claim already created a liability for whatever the employee purchased on your behalf. Doing it twice would be double-dipping.

You say you’re looking for an easier workflow. Compare either of these transactions with a purchase invoice: (1) you enter the transaction that creates the liability, and (2) you spend money to discharge the liability. In either case, two actions.

3

As always @Tut, you’ve explained it perfectly. As I was reading that I was saying to myself, “yeah, I’m seeing that.” But I hadn’t until you made the statement about the payslip being a liability/expense to the employer.

Having said that, I see that I am doing it the right way, but I’d still like some simpler way of paying those out. It would seem the simplest approach would be (like suppliers and customers) to include “Spend Money” on the employee’s tab and you could select expense claims and payslips just as you do for the purchase invoices (as exampled in my last two screenshots—albeit in the last sample, you wouldn’t need to include the head “employee clearing account” since that’s where we are (payments related to employees), but you would select the employee and the sub account/liability you are paying).

It’s just my complete lay approach to it, I hope I’m not too far off the mark and that @lubos could think about including it in with all the million other things that everyone wants. lol

But thanks again because you have actually made me see the payslip a little differently. I think I realised, but you’ve helped the penny find it’s place :slight_smile:

4

I hate to come back to this, but I still find it frustrating that with total monies owed to employees (through expense claims mainly), there is no way to acquit like there is a purchase or sales invoice. Everything has to be manually populated by the user. As per my other suggestion about grouping multiple supplier invoices (link) you can’t even pay a single expense claim from the equivalent of a purchase invoice screen (ie the expenses screen, nor is each expense claim visible to be paid in the way that purchase invoices have invoice numbers).

At least the purchase invoice has a spend money feature on it. Expense claims do not.

Clearing payments to suppliers and employees could do with better workflow.

@lubos any chance of getting this onto the roadmap

5

One of the problems with making the process of paying expense claims similar to paying invoices is that expense claim liabilities can end up in three places: Expense claims, Employee clearing account, or Capital accounts, depending on which type the claimant is. The point of the Expense Claims module is to register the claims.

Your issues have always been about paying employees. I admit, it can be a little cumbersome to drill down in the Employee clearing account to see what you owe an employee for various reasons, then have to pop out to Cash Accounts to pay them…and back…and forth…and back…and forth. Some better bulk payroll processing capability would take care of that.

Can you elaborate?

6

Yeah, the suppliers is more to do with managing (including paying) multiple purchase invoices at once and I have raised that one here (different scope, different thread):

re employees, I’m talking about this thread generally with expense claims and payslips.

I do honestly get what you’re saying about it being an accounting package and it’s not for tax compliance but for tracking your accounts (poorly paraphrased, sorry), but the thing is each week we are accounting for our payments to suppliers in multiple lots, we do pay our employees their pay items and expenses at the same time and as that accounting package, manager would be super nice if those payment workflows were auto-populating and easy to access rather than fumbling through adding up everything manually and doing it ourselves. After all, that is why we use accounting packages in the first place, to do all that adding up for us. :slight_smile: