Expense reports (notes de frais)

The full expense-report workflow — draft, submit, approve, reimburse — with receipts, duplicate detection and director auto-posting.

What an expense report is

An expense report — a note de frais in French — groups the out-of-pocket costs one person racked up on the company’s behalf: a taxi, a client lunch, a hardware purchase. In Qontab each report carries one line per expense, a receipt attached to that line, and an employee it belongs to. It moves through a short approval flow and, once approved, posts to your books as a real expense and a debt you owe that person — ready to be reimbursed.

The point of the workflow is control: nobody’s claim hits the general ledger until it has been reviewed and approved, and you always know which reports are still owed money.

The workflow: draft → submit → approve → pay

A report walks through four states. Each transition is deliberate, and Qontab refuses out-of-order moves, so the books only ever reflect approved spending.

• Draft — fully editable. Add or remove lines, attach receipts, fix amounts. Only a draft can be deleted outright.
• Submitted — sent for review. From here it can be approved or rejected; a rejected report can be corrected and resubmitted.
• Approved — cleared for posting. The lines now need a GL account so Qontab knows where each cost belongs.
• Paid — the report is posted: Qontab writes one journal entry debiting the expense accounts and crediting the payable owed to the employee. “Paid” here means posted to the ledger, not yet “cash handed back” — that’s the separate reimbursement flag below.

The posted entry behaves like any other — see recording transactions for how Qontab keeps every entry balanced.

Receipts and duplicate detection

Every line takes its own receipt — one document per expense — so the proof stays attached to the exact cost it supports. That matters at audit time and when a single report spans several categories.

Because the same receipt is easy to capture twice — once as a note de frais and once as the matching bank line — Qontab runs a conservative duplicate check. It surfaces likely repeats between your reports and your posted expense transactions when they share a currency, sit within 2% of the same amount, and fall within fourteen days of each other.

• Each flagged pair is a suggestion, never an automatic correction — Qontab won’t touch your ledger on its own.
• You confirm a pair (it stays flagged for you to fix) or dismiss it (it disappears for good).

Reimbursement

Reimbursement is tracked separately from posting, with three states on each report:

• Not required — the cash already moved out-of-band (the employee was paid back through a normal bank payment), so there’s nothing left to settle here.
• Pending — the report is posted and the company still owes the money.
• Reimbursed — you’ve marked it paid back; Qontab stamps the date. A report has to be posted before it can be marked reimbursed.

Keeping the two ideas apart means your balance sheet shows the real liability — money owed to people — distinct from cash that has actually left the bank.

Director expense reports

When the report belongs to your designated director, Qontab handles it differently. There’s no separate pay step: approving the report auto-posts it, and the amount owed is credited to the Director’s Loan Account (chart code 1126) instead of the generic employee payable. The report’s reimbursement is set to pending so the running balance the company owes the director stays visible.

Settling it later — paying the director back — is recorded against that loan account, which keeps the director’s current account clean and auditable. A non-director report can never touch account 1126.

With AI (MCP)

Through the Qontab MCP connector, an AI assistant can drive the whole flow in plain language. The granular tools mirror the workflow — create_expense_report, update_expense_report, submit_expense_report, approve_expense_report, reject_expense_report and pay_expense_report — while reimburse_director_expense_report posts a director’s report to the loan account and find_expense_duplicates returns the likely repeats described above.

For the common path, the composite process_expense_report chains create → submit → approve → pay in a single call, stopping at whatever stage you ask for.

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