Expenses
Record operating spend that does not arrive through a purchase order — rent, fuel, subscriptions, repairs — with optional sign-off, a payment record, and the accounting entries behind both.
Expenses live under Accounting → Expenses. Use them for costs that are not stock purchases: a purchase order buys things you receive into inventory, an expense records money spent on running the business. Each expense carries a number, a category, a date, an amount and tax, a payment method, and — optionally — the vendor, the project, and the expense account it should post to.
The Four States
| Status | What it means |
|---|---|
| Pending approval | Raised, awaiting sign-off, not yet payable. Only appears if your organization has switched approval on. |
| Unpaid | Recognised as a cost and owed. Sitting in accounts payable. |
| Paid | Settled from bank or cash. |
| Rejected | Declined with a reason. The cost recognition is reversed, not left hanging. |
Approval Is Opt-In — And Switching It On Is A Permission
There is no hidden settings toggle. Approval becomes active the moment your organization grants the approve expense permission to any role. Grant it and every new expense is raised as pending approval; revoke it everywhere and expenses are payable straight away. A one-person business simply never grants it and sees no approval step at all.
One rule cannot be bought past with permissions: whoever raised an expense cannot approve it. That is the entire purpose of the control — an approval you can give yourself is a formality, not a second pair of eyes. If you are the only person with the permission and you raised the expense, someone else has to approve it.
What It Posts To The Ledger
- When recorded as payable: the expense account is debited and accounts payable credited — the cost is recognised on the day it is raised, not the day it is paid.
- When paid: accounts payable is debited and the bank or cash account credited, depending on the payment method.
- When rejected: the original recognition is reversed with its own referenced entry, so the reversal is visible rather than implied.
Recording an expense as already paid collapses the first two steps into one entry. Either way you can follow the numbers in the General Ledger.
Expenses Against Projects
Tagging an expense to a project is what makes project profitability real: cost recorded against delivery, not only labour. Only live projects are offered — completed, cancelled and archived ones are excluded from the picker.
Reporting
The index totals unpaid and paid spend and filters by status. For a period view by category, use the Expense Summary report under Reports, which exports to CSV and PDF. Money actually leaving the business also appears in the Payments Register.
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