AWRA Help Center

Finance works from Accounting → Journal, then Staff Advances in the accounting sidebar. A member of staff who can only request advances sees My Advances there instead, and also finds it in the Accounting quick actions. Some organizations call this imprest.

The Life Of An Advance

1. Request. Choose the member of staff, the purpose and the amount, and optionally a department and project. Every advance gets its own number.
2. Approve (only when approval is switched on). Otherwise the advance is approved as soon as it is raised.
3. Issue the money. Pick the bank, cash or petty cash account it was paid from, and the date. This is the moment it posts, and it sets the retire by date: the issue date plus the number of days set in Accounting Defaults (14 unless you change it).
4. Retire. The member of staff, or finance on their behalf, accounts for the money: one line per receipt (what it was spent on, the expense account, the amount, and a photo or PDF of the receipt), plus any cash handed back and the account it went into. You can retire in more than one go.
5. Settle what is left. If they spent more than they were given, reimburse them. If part of the advance will never come back, write it off.

Requesting Your Own Advance

With only the request permission, you see and act on your own advances — the ones raised for the employee record linked to your login. You can request one and retire it with receipts; you cannot raise one for anyone else. If you see Your login is not linked to an employee record, ask HR to link your user to your employee record first (see Employee Management).

Approval

Approval is a switch in Settings → Accounting Defaults, off by default. With it on, both the advance and each retirement wait for somebody with the approve permission, and two people are excluded:

• whoever raised it, and
• the member of staff it is for. The person holding the money has the strongest reason to approve their own receipts, so they never can — whatever role they hold.

An advance can be rejected, with a reason, at any point before it is issued.

What Posts To The Ledger

• Issue: debit Staff Advances, credit the account it was paid from. Issued from a petty cash float, it posts as a payment voucher on that float instead, and is refused if the box does not have that much available (see Petty Cash).
• Retirement: debit each expense line and the account the returned cash went into; credit Staff Advances up to what is still outstanding. Anything spent beyond the advance is credited to Staff Reimbursements Payable — it is now owed to the member of staff.
• Reimburse: debit Staff Reimbursements Payable, credit the bank or cash account you paid them from.
• Write off: debit the expense account you choose, credit Staff Advances for whatever is outstanding.

Every entry carries the advance’s department and project, and each receipt line can carry its own. Staff Advances and Staff Reimbursements Payable are kept by the advance itself, and choosing either on a line is refused — a receipt charged to the advance account would clear it on paper while the ledger still showed it owed. Expense lines must use an expense account, and money in or out must use a bank, cash or petty cash account.

Overdue Advances And Reminders

An issued advance with money still outstanding after its retire-by date is marked overdue. Every morning the system emails the member of staff, copying the person who raised it, with the amount outstanding and how many days late it is. Each advance is reminded at most once every three days, so a slow retirement is chased without flooding anyone’s inbox.

Finance sees an ageing summary at the top of the list: what is not yet due, and what is 1–30, 31–60, 61–90 and over 90 days late.

Permissions

• View staff advances — see every advance and its receipts.
• Manage staff advances — raise advances for anyone, issue, retire and reimburse.
• Approve staff advances — approve or reject advances and retirements, and write off.
• Request staff advances — request and retire your own advances only.

Common Mistakes

• Returning more cash than is outstanding. Refused, with the amount still open shown.
• Writing off with a retirement still pending. Approve or reject the pending retirement first, then write off what is left.
• Writing off your own advance. Somebody else has to do it.
• Dating an issue or retirement in a closed month. Refused — use a date in an open month (see Month-End Close).
• Using an advance for a cost the organization already owes a supplier. That is a bill or an expense, not an advance. See Expenses.

Related

• Petty Cash — issuing an advance from a cash box.
• Employee Self-Service — other things staff do for themselves.
• Petty cash and staff advances — the feature overview.