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Expenses

← Invoice Management ← About Receivables and Payables

Generally, an expense is any type of costs that a company incurs to do business. JustOn Billing & Invoice Management supports expenses using dedicated expense records and expense item records, which represent the payable and hold all relevant information.

General Expense Concepts

As companies do business and generate revenue, they incur expenses. These are, simply put, the costs required to spend in order to function. Common business expenses include supplies, utilities or salaries.

Typically, companies have to pay suppliers for purchased goods and services. In these cases, the purchase invoice (or incoming invoice) represents the legal foundation for the payable costs.

Expenses in JustOn Billing & Invoice Management

JustOn Billing & Invoice Management supports expenses using the dedicated objects Expense and Expense Item. The software allows for creating expenses from inbound electronic invoices, as well as for transferring expense-based bookkeeping data to DATEV.

Enabling Expense Import Enabling Expense Visualization

Expense

An expense represents the payable – the obligation to pay suppliers for provided goods or services. Typically, expenses represent incoming invoices, travel receipts, etc.

An expense holds all relevant information about the payable costs, such as amount, payee, IBAN or payment reference. For details, see the Expense object reference.

Technically, expenses are in a master-detail relationship with expense items.

exp_exp_i

Expense Amount

Although expenses represent payables, they indicate positive amounts – after all, your incoming invoice also shows a positive amount. Downstream processes must make sure, for example, that the correct payment operations are triggered or that the correct booking data is created.

  • Assume you apply custom logic (a Salesforce flow or Apex code) to create JustOn Cash Management entries from expenses: you must create entries of the type Credit with a negative amount. This makes sure that you trigger payouts for them.

    For information on required data for credit entries, see "Eligible entries for SEPA Credit Transfer" under SEPA Credit Transfer.

    entry from expense

  • When preparing booking data for expenses, JustOn Billing & Invoice Management writes accounting document records of the type Accounts Payable Ledger. As a matter of fact, the amount on the related accounting document items is also positive. But the accounting document type makes sure that the data is correctly handled as payables by DATEV.

    accounting document from expense

Expense Status

Depending on their lifecycle state, expenses can have different statuses.

expense_statuses

Status Description
Planned Indicates an expected but not yet received expense.
Planned expenses are part of the budget or financial forecast of a company but do not have significance for tax purposes.
Accrued Indicates a received expense. Accrued expenses represent incurred costs that are, however, not yet approved/unapproved, canceled or paid.
Accrued expenses, as opposed to planned expenses, are subject to the financial reporting.
Approved Indicates an expense that has passed the (internal) approval process – that is, a responsible user has confirmed that the relevant information (amount, payee, IBAN, payment reference, etc.) is correct and justified.
Approved expenses are to be paid.
Paid Indicates an expense that has been paid.

expense_statuses_2

Status Description
Unapproved Indicates an expense that has not passed the (internal) approval process because some of the relevant data is wrong or not justified.
Unapproved expenses will not be considered for payment.
Canceled Indicates an expense that has been canceled by the payee. That is, the supplier who originally raised the payment request has confirmed that they canceled the claim.
Expenses cannot be canceled by the payer.
Canceled expenses will not be considered for payment.

Reporting Category

Expenses allow for being assigned reporting categories. These categories are grouping attributes that can be used to cluster expenses for internal reporting purposes. Typical values may include, for example, Rent, Tax Counseling, Marketing or Education.

Your org can define the reporting categories as required to specifically cover your business use cases as custom picklist values in the Reporting Category field. For details on managing picklist values, see Modifying Picklist Values.

Expense Item

An expense item represents an individual item of an expense. It holds the fiscally relevant information like tax rate and tax code, and all accounting-relevant information, including G/L account, center and cost object. This allows for individually applying the relevant tax to each purchased product or service, as well as individually applying downstream accounting procedures. For details, see the Expense Item object reference.

Technically, expense items are in a master-detail relationship with expenses.

exp_exp_i

Expense items allow for being assigned accounting categories. These categories are used to determine the G/L account, cost center/profit center and cost object for the expense item. They are therefore of direct significance for the financial accounting, as opposed to the reporting category of an expense.

Expenses From Electronic Invoices and PDF Files

JustOn Billing & Invoice Management creates expenses from inbound electronic invoices (XML files) and PDF files.

For information on outgoing e-invoices, see E-Invoice Support in JustOn.

For inbound invoices, there are two input methods:

Email Service

The software can automatically process incoming invoices received by email using a dedicated email service.

Once set up accordingly, JustOn Billing & Invoice Management processes the received invoice file:

  • E-invoice XML files are validated against the e-invoice standard
  • PDF files are sent to the Azure Document Intelligence service for data extraction

On successful processing, the software creates the according expense in the status Accrued and the related expense items.

Limitations

General behavior
  • For best results, make sure to attach one invoice file per email (XML or PDF).
  • With XML and PDF attachments in one email, XML files take precedence over PDF files.
  • With multiple XML attachments or multiple PDF attachments without XML, JustOn Billing & Invoice Management creates an empty fallback expense record with the given files attached.
  • Any other files (JPG, PNG, CSV, etc.) will be attached to the created expense record.
XML file requirements
  • File extension: .xml
  • MIME type: application/xml or text/xml
  • In case of a validation failure, JustOn Billing & Invoice Management will create a fallback expense with the e-invoice status Validation Error.
PDF file requirements
  • Requires Azure Document Intelligence integration
  • File extension: .pdf
  • Without a configured Azure DI integration or in case of a parsing failure, JustOn Billing & Invoice Management will create a fallback expense with the type Undefined and the PDF file attached.

If a submitted file fails processing, the file and the additional attachments will be saved with an empty fallback expense. This allows users to process the retrievable information manually.

Manual Upload and Import

Users can manually upload incoming invoices (e-invoice XML files or PDF files). For details, see Importing Incoming Invoice.

JustOn Billing & Invoice Management processes the uploaded invoice file. XML files are validated against the e-invoice standard. PDF files are sent to Azure AI Document Intelligence for parsing. On successful processing, the software creates the according expense in the status Accrued and the related expense items.

Limitations

Users can only upload a single invoice file in one go. XML files must have the file extension .xml. PDF files must have the extension .pdf.

PDF Processing With Azure Document Intelligence

Your organization may receive PDF files for purchase invoices. To have the invoice data extracted automatically, JustOn Billing & Invoice Management can integrate with Azure Document Intelligence.

Once set up accordingly,

  • JustOn Billing & Invoice Management sends the PDF file (received by email or uploaded manually) to the Azure Document Intelligence service
  • Using OCR and AI, Azure Document Intelligence extracts the invoice data and maps it to its data model, returning a JSON file
  • JustOn Billing & Invoice Management maps the data from the extraction response to Expense and Expense Item fields

Info

Before you can use Azure Document Intelligence with JustOn Billing & Invoice Management, your organization must sign up for an Azure account with Microsoft. JustOn recommends to select the Pay as you go option. There is a free quota of 500 pages per month; beyond that, usage-based pricing applies (see Azure Document Intelligence in Foundry Tools pricing).

To enable Azure Document Intelligence with JustOn Billing & Invoice Management, you must provide your Azure credentials. For details, see Enabling Azure Document Intelligence.

Processing Log

Users can review the detailed processing steps for each imported expense.

The Import Expense dialog displays the import log after the processing completes. The log shows all processing events: format detection, Azure PDF parsing (if applicable), field validation, account matching, etc. Ultimately, it indicates whether the import has been successful or if errors have occurred.

Each imported expense includes the processing log as a file attachment. This is a JSON file (<original-filename>_processing-log), which contains all processing events with timestamps and details.

To enable users to easily access the processing log, your org can add the processingLogViewer component to the expense detail view. For details, see Configuring Processing Log Display.

Data Transfer to Accounting Systems

To seamlessly transfer expense-based bookkeeping data to DATEV, JustOn Billing & Invoice Management integrates with JustOn Connector for DATEV. This is an add-on to JustOn Billing & Invoice Management that generates DATEV-specific ledger records from expenses, and transfers them to DATEV Unternehmen online. Once there, these accounting documents and accounting document items can be used by any DATEV application that accesses the DATEV Cloud.

For expenses of the types Approved, Paid or Canceled, an accounting document record of the type Accounts Payable Ledger is created. Each expense item is exported to an accounting document item (1:1 relationship). The two objects are linked with each other. Supporting documents and e-invoice XML attachments (that is, files whose content version type is set to E-Invoice or Supporting Document) are copied and attached to the accounting document. The maximum size per file is 3,76 MB. In addition, an individual expense export history record is created for each expense, which is used to store details about the transfer or transfer attempt.

Note that each expense can be exported only once to the same export destination.

On successful transfer, the Locked checkbox of the accounting document is selected, and the related expense export history is marked as exported. This indicates that the related expense is excluded from further exports to the same destination.

In case of errors, neither an accounting document nor an accounting detail is created for the affected expenses, and an error message is written to the expense export history or the affected expense item.

For details, see Data Transfer to DATEV.