Staff Expense Claims: Submit, Approve & Repay

An expense claim is how a member of staff asks to be repaid for money they spent on the organization’s behalf — a bus fare to a client site, a night in a hotel for a field visit, airtime bought to reach a supplier. It is different from the Expenses module, where finance records organization spend directly. A claim belongs to an employee, carries one line per expense with receipts attached, and moves through a fixed life: draft, then submitted, then approved, then repaid. A claim that needs correcting is returned to its owner, who can fix it and submit it again.

There are two places to work from. Employees raise and follow their claims under Human Resources → My Claims, the self-service tab beside My Leave and My Payslips. Approvers work from Human Resources → Overview → Expense Claims, a queue that opens on Awaiting approval with tabs for claims that are approved but not yet repaid, claims that are repaid, and claims that were returned. The claimant is told at each turn — when the claim is approved, returned with its reason, and repaid — so nobody has to chase finance for a status update.

In practice: Otieno, a field officer with a Kisumu agricultural NGO, spends KES 14,750 on a two-day farm visit — KES 2,400 on transport, KES 9,500 on a guesthouse and KES 2,850 on meals. On Monday he raises one claim with three lines from My Claims and submits it. It appears in the programme manager’s Awaiting approval tab. She approves it on Tuesday, it moves to the approved-not-yet-repaid tab, and when it is repaid with the month’s payroll it moves to Repaid. At every step Otieno sees the same status she does.

To raise a claim, open My Claims → New claim. Your login has to be linked to your employee record; if it is not, HR links it. Give the claim a title and its currency as a three-letter code such as KES or USD — an invented code like KSH is refused. Then add one line per expense: the date, which cannot be in the future; a category such as travel, accommodation, meals, fuel, airtime, supplies or fees; a description; the amount; and, optionally, the project the spend was for. A claim can carry up to 50 lines.

Attach the receipts as PDFs or photos — JPG, PNG, WEBP or HEIC — up to 10 MB each and ten per save. They are stored in the Document Vault against the claim, so the approver opens them from the claim itself rather than from an email thread. You can save a draft and come back to it, or submit for approval, which notifies everyone who can approve claims except you. Once submitted, a claim is fixed: what the approver sees is exactly what you sent. To change a submitted claim, ask for it to be returned, then correct it and submit again.

In practice: Amina, a sales representative in Arusha, photographs her fuel receipts on the road — four fills totalling TZS 186,000 — and her phone saves them as HEIC files. Back at the office she opens My Claims, adds four fuel lines dated across the week, tags them to the Moshi distributor launch project, and attaches the four photos. She saves a draft, notices one date was keyed as next Friday, which the form refuses, corrects it, and submits. An hour later she realises she forgot a TZS 12,000 parking fee; because the claim is already submitted, she asks her approver to return it so she can add the line.

An approver opens the claim from the queue, checks the lines and opens the receipts. Before approving, they choose how it will be repaid — through payroll in a month they pick, or directly. Approving can carry an optional comment. Returning a claim requires a reason, because the reason is what the claimant sees and acts on; a bare “returned” sends them guessing. A returned claim goes back to its owner to correct and submit again.

Nobody approves their own claim while anyone else in the organization can approve claims, whatever permissions they hold. That is a rule about people, not permissions: an administrator with every permission is still refused on their own claim. The one exception is a workspace where nobody else can approve claims at all — there the claimant may decide it, so the claim does not wait forever, and the audit log records that it was self-decided. After approval, plans can change: a claim that is approved but not repaid can be moved to another payroll month or switched between payroll and direct repayment. If the approval itself was a mistake, withdraw it with a reason — the booking is reversed, any queued payroll line is removed, and the claim goes back to its owner as returned.

In practice: the finance manager of a Nairobi consultancy, Peter, submits his own KES 6,200 taxi claim. The managing director also holds the approval permission, so when Peter opens his claim in the queue he cannot approve it — the MD has to. Later that week the MD approves a KES 31,000 conference claim for repayment in the March payroll, then learns the employee was already reimbursed by the conference organiser. Because March has not been paid yet, he withdraws the approval with the reason “Refunded by the organiser — please withdraw or reduce”, and the queued payroll line disappears with it.

The spend is booked at approval, because the organization owes the employee from that moment rather than from the day the money moves. Each line is debited to the expense account its category is mapped to, tagged with its project and the employee’s department, against Staff Reimbursements Payable. When the claim is repaid, that payable is cleared: a direct repayment clears it against the account the money left, and a payroll repayment clears it inside the payroll posting, so the claim is not counted a second time as payroll cost. Withdrawing an approval reverses exactly what the approval booked.

The category mapping is the part to set up early. Under Human Resources → Overview → Targets & alerts, the Expense claim accounts section maps each claim category to an expense account in your chart of accounts. A category left unmapped books to Operating Expenses, which is correct but tells you nothing about where the money went. The ledger runs in your organization’s base currency and is never converted, so a claim in another currency is not posted; it is repaid without a journal and the audit log notes that.

In practice: a Kampala water charity maps travel to Field Travel, accommodation to Field Accommodation and meals to Subsistence, and leaves the other categories on Operating Expenses. When a UGX 420,000 claim is approved — UGX 150,000 travel, UGX 220,000 accommodation, UGX 50,000 meals — three debits land on those three accounts, each tagged to the borehole project and the Programmes department, with UGX 420,000 credited to Staff Reimbursements Payable. The donor report for the borehole project now shows the field costs on the day of approval, not weeks later when payroll runs.

Choosing payroll makes the claim a one-off earning on the employee’s payslip for the month chosen. It is neither taxable nor pensionable, because it returns the employee’s own money rather than paying them for work, so it does not change their income tax or pension contributions. The claim is marked repaid automatically when that payroll run is posted — nobody has to remember to tick it off.

Three checks apply when you choose payroll, and each one exists because the alternative is a claim that would never be paid. The month’s run must not already be approved or paid, because a closed run never calculates again — choose a later month. The employee needs an active employment contract, because a run only pays employees who have one. And the claim must be in the currency the employee is paid in, because payroll never converts currencies; a claim in another currency is repaid directly instead.

In practice: in late April an HR officer in Kigali approves three claims for the April payroll. The first, RWF 48,000 for Jean-Paul, is accepted and appears on his April payslip as an untaxed line. The second is refused because April’s run was approved that morning, so she picks May. The third, from a consultant on a short assignment with no active contract, is refused with the advice to repay directly, which she does. When the May run is posted, the second claim moves to Repaid on its own.

A claim approved for direct repayment is paid outside payroll — by bank transfer, mobile money, cash or petty cash. Once the money has actually been paid, open the claim, enter the payment reference and the account it was paid from, and mark it repaid; if you leave the account empty, Bank is used. Choosing a petty cash box records a voucher on that float, so the box’s own list explains the payment, and the box cannot pay out more than it holds. A claim set to payroll repayment cannot be marked repaid here — the payroll run marks it when it posts.

Three permissions divide the work. Submit own expense claims lets someone use My Claims for their own claims only. View expense claims opens the queue, the claims and their receipts. Approve expense claims covers approving, returning, changing the repayment, withdrawing an approval and marking a claim repaid. The common mistakes are all avoidable: typing a currency that is not a real code, choosing payroll for someone with no active contract, picking a payroll month that has already been approved, returning a claim without saying what to fix, and leaving every category on Operating Expenses when your chart has travel, fuel or subsistence accounts.

In practice: a Nairobi retailer repays a KES 3,600 airtime claim by M-Pesa from the company’s mobile-money account. The finance assistant enters the M-Pesa confirmation code as the reference, picks the M-Pesa account and marks the claim repaid, which clears the payable against that account. A smaller KES 850 stationery claim is paid in cash from the branch petty cash box, which held KES 2,000; the voucher shows on the box, leaving KES 1,150. A KES 2,400 claim attempted from the same box the next day is refused, because the box no longer holds enough.