Expenses

← Payments in Billing & Invoice Management

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.

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 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

JustOn Billing & Invoice Management creates expenses from inbound electronic invoices. (For information on outgoing e-invoices, see E-Invoice Support in JustOn.)

Currently, there are two options to register expenses:

Email service

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

Once set up accordingly, JustOn Billing & Invoice Management evaluates the received e-invoice XML file. On successful validation, the software creates the according expense in the status Accrued and the related expense items.

Limitations

The email service will only process emails with one (e-invoice) XML attachment. The XML files must have the file extension .xml and the MIME type application/xml or text/xml.

If no or more than one XML files are attached to the email, no expense will be created.

Any other attachments, like PDF files, will be attached to the produced expense record. If there is no expense created, the attachments will not be saved.

If a submitted e-invoice fails the validation, JustOn Billing & Invoice Management creates a fallback expense of the type Undefined and the e-invoice status Validation Error. Nevertheless, the (invalid) e-invoice XML file and the additional attachments will be saved with the expense. This will allow users to process the retrievable information manually.

Manual upload and import

Users can manually upload e-invoice XML files.

JustOn Billing & Invoice Management will evaluate the XML file and import the e-invoice data. On successful validation, the software creates the according expense in the status Accrued and the related expense items.

Limitations

Users can only upload a single e-invoice file in one go. The XML files must have the file extension .xml.

Enabling Expense Email Service
Importing Incoming E-Invoice

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 each expense, 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 (maximum size per file: 3.76 MB) are copied and attached to the accounting document. 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.