Expenses
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.
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.
Expense Status
Depending on their lifecycle state, expenses can have different 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. |
| 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.
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.