Expenses

Expense and material claims, from the worker's receipt to a bill in Xero and a line in the bank file. A worker files a claim with a photo of the receipt; Saral reads it, checks it against the expense policy and codes it; a person approves it on the To approve desk; Approve pushes the bill to Xero in the same click and Pay collects what is due into a bank file. Nothing approves itself — every claim is decided by a person, and the desk's job is to make that decision fast.

You enter

A claim: the worker (the office may file for anyone), the amount, the category, the project, what it was for and the receipt — or mileage, or a scale-rate subsistence day where the policy allows it.
The decision on each claim: Approve (which pushes), Ask to amend with a note the worker sees, or Reject with a reason; a tick of several ready claims to approve together.
Any correction to the coding Saral proposed — the entity, GL, VAT rate and project — on Code & push.
Which approved claims go into this bank file, and which month's claims to export.

Saral fills in

What the receipt says — supplier, date, amount, VAT — read overnight first and at once when asked, and whether it matches the claim.
The policy checks: the claim cap, the receipt threshold, the Finance threshold for a second approval, duplicates, late filing and the review rules — each a flag with a reason, and a Ready or Needs you verdict.
The coding — entity, GL by nature, VAT and project — from the coding rules, the last push or the nature of the spend; a person's own pick is never overwritten.
Whether a claim is a benefit in kind (P11D), from the benefit rules; the company-card lines that match a card-holder's claim.
The Ready · Needs you · Waiting counts, the finance tiles, and the daily summary to approvers.

It produces

A bill in Xero per approved claim (landing as draft, awaiting approval or awaiting payment — your choice on the gear), or a Spend Money against the card for a company-card claim.
A bank payment file for the claims on Pay, and a month-end CSV per paying company, downloaded or emailed.
The worker's own view of every claim and its state, and the Report view of spend by worker, project and category.

What this page is for

A worker spends their own money on the job and should get it back without a form, a chase or a surprise. This page is the whole pipeline: the claim is filed with a receipt, read and checked by Saral, approved by a person, pushed to Xero as a bill and paid through a bank file — with the worker able to see where it is at every step. The office lands on To approve; a worker sees My expenses with Submitted, Approved and Paid.

A person always approves

Saral reads the receipt, runs the policy and gives each claim a verdict — Ready or Needs you — but it never approves a claim itself. Hands-free approval is switched off for every account and cannot be turned on; what the policy's limits now decide is only which claims arrive on the desk as Ready. The desk exists so a person can approve the ready ones in one tap and spend their attention on the flagged ones. The phone page at /hr/expenses/approve is the same desk for the daily summary email: Ready in one tap, Needs you one card at a time.

Coded before it is opened

Since the intake stamps coding at submission, a pending claim arrives with its entity, GL, VAT and project filled from your coding rules, the last push for the same spend, or the nature of the spend — each marked with where it came from. Approve therefore pushes in the same click; only a claim with a gap waits on Code & push. A coding a person chose by hand is never overwritten by the resolver, which is what makes Approve & push safe to trust.

Cards, benefits and the month end

A worker with a company card has their claims matched to the card feed, posted against the card org and marked paid from the card — never into the bank file. Fees beside a purchase fold into it when the policy says so. A claim that is partly personal, or a staff function over the per-head limit, is flagged as a benefit in kind and listed for P11D in Payroll; Saral works out the figures and the payroll software files the return. At month end the CSV per paying company, by filed or expense month, is what the accountant takes.

Where the settings live

HR → Settings → Expenses owns the policy: the claim cap, the receipt threshold, the Finance threshold and approvers, the daily summary, the review rules, scale-rate subsistence, mileage, company-card fees, the benefit-in-kind rules, the coding rules and GL by nature, and the mailbox claims can be emailed to. Where a pushed bill lands in Xero is the gear on this page. Whether a worker may file claims at all is on their profile.

Next screen: /hr/accreditations

Not what you needed? Inside Saral, ask Kuku (Alt+K) — if it cannot answer, “Ask a human” sends the question to Saral support with the chat attached.