A typical expense claim that I have has gas, food, and office supplies expense paid by employees’ personal funds.
Is there any way that I can get a report showing totals for all employees in each group of expenses?
Use a combination of Search and column sorting under the Expense Claims tab. For example, Search for Roberto’s name. Then sort by clicking the Account column heading. You will have all of Roberto’s expense claims, with Food expenses, then Gas expenses, then Office supplies. Export to a spreadsheet for further manipulation.
Or search for Office supplies, then sort by Payer name. You will have a list by employee of expense claims for office supplies.
Or search for the year and sort the result.
Or export the entire expense claims list and do all your searching and sorting in the spreadsheet.
This means that I should create an expense claim for every individual item. But if I have Roberto’s expenses on a single claim, I can only see the total amount of the claim.
Well, all accounts represented on an expense claim (for multiple line items) will show. But no, you can’t produce a report that just shows how much Roberto spent on gas via expense claims. But you can drill down on the Gas account to see which purchases of gas were via expense claim. However, in that case, you can’t see that Roberto bought the gas instead of Maria.
The bottom line is that someone can always think up a report they’d like to see organized in some particular fashion with specific content. Until Custom Reports get fleshed out and documented, you may have to work harder than you want to obtain these non-standard reports. Meanwhile, there are almost 40 reports meeting most standard accounting needs.