Travel declarations and per-diem

Declare business trips with per-country per-diem rates, route the approval, post the per-diem entry and link related expenses.

What travel declarations are

A travel declaration records a business trip and the per-diem it earns. You describe where the traveller went — one leg per country — set a daily allowance (per-diem) for each, and Qontab works out the total. The declaration then moves through a short approval workflow, and when it’s paid it posts a single journal entry that books the per-diem to your travel expense account. It’s the clean way to turn “three days in Paris, two in London” into a balanced accounting entry without typing debits and credits by hand.

It sits next to expense reports: a declaration is for the per-diem allowance itself, while the actual receipts (hotels, flights, taxis) are recorded as ordinary transactions and linked to the trip.

Legs and per-diem rates

Every declaration is built from one or more legs. A leg is a stretch of the trip in a single country and carries four things:

• Country — a two- or three-letter country code for the destination.
• Start and end dates — the span of the traveller’s stay in that country.
• Number of days — how many days of allowance the leg earns.
• Per-diem rate — the daily allowance for that country.

Qontab computes each leg as rate × days and the declaration total as the sum of every leg. A trip with different rates for Paris and London is just two legs; the total is whatever they add up to. Every declaration needs at least one leg.

From draft to paid

A declaration moves through four states. Each transition is one click and is recorded in the audit trail:

1. Draft — you build the trip: title, dates, legs and rates. Only drafts can be edited or deleted.
2. Submitted — the draft is sent for review. (A reviewer can send it back as rejected.)
3. Approved — the trip is confirmed. Nothing is posted to the ledger yet — approval is just the green light.
4. Paid — Qontab posts the per-diem journal entry and marks the declaration paid.

The posting at the pay step is a standard double entry: it debits your travel expense account and credits the counterpart account — by default the director’s loan / associate current account (1126), which is right when the trip was funded by a director or owner. You can override either account at pay time.

Linking related expenses

Per-diem rarely covers the whole trip. Hotels, flights and transport are recorded as normal income or expense transactions, then linked to the declaration so the trip reads as a single story. Linking points an existing posted entry at the declaration; it doesn’t change the entry or post anything new. You can unlink just as easily if you attached the wrong one.

The result: open one travel declaration and see the per-diem you owe the traveller alongside every out-of-band cost the trip generated.

Currency and FX

A declaration carries its own currency. It defaults to MUR but accepts any three-letter ISO code, so a euro-rate trip stays in euros while you enter the per-diems. When the per-diem entry is posted, Qontab resolves the exchange rate as of the trip end date and stores the base-currency amounts on the journal lines — so your reports consolidate the trip into your base currency automatically. See multi-currency & FX for how rates are stored and refreshed.

Travel declarations with AI (MCP)

Connected to an AI assistant through the Qontab MCP connector, the whole flow is conversational. The assistant calls create_travel_declaration to draft the trip with its legs, then submit_travel_declaration, approve_travel_declaration and pay_travel_declaration to walk it to posting. Use link_travel_transaction and unlink_travel_transaction to attach or detach the hotel and flight entries.

FAQ