Create and update reimbursable expenses

Record and update reimbursable expense transactions that represent your customers' repayable spend

Overview

A reimbursable expense is a cost incurred by an employee which is eligible to be refunded or compensated by their employer or another party. In accounting systems, reimbursable expenses are represented as bills that are listed against the employee as the supplier (recordRef).

Compatible integrations

Check our supported expense types for an up-to-date list of integrations that support this functionality.

With Sync for Expenses, you need to create the reimbursable expense transactions first.

This will initiate the sync to reflect these in your customer's accounting platform. Finally, once these transactions have been synced, you can upload attachments to associate receipts with the transaction.

This process is summarized on the diagram below.

Create reimbursable expenses

To create a new reimbursable expense transaction in Codat, use the Create reimbursable expense transaction endpoint.

In the request URL, make sure that the transaction's id is unique as it serves as an idempotence key. Codat validates the id to ensure that it's unique to a company, preventing the creation of duplicate transactions in your SMB's accounting software.

Reimbursable expense request body

{
   "items":[
      {
         "id":"81539597-e681-40c9-a4dd-ec2fffcde572",
         "reference":"101",
         "contactRef":{
            "id":"341"
         },
         "issueDate":"2022-04-29T00:00:00",
         "dueDate":"2022-04-29T00:00:00",
         "currency":"GBP",
         "notes":"Reimbursable Expense Demo",
         "lines":[
            {
               "netAmount":50,
               "taxAmount":10,
               "taxRateRef":{
                  "id":"3_Bills"
               },
               "accountRef":{
                  "id":"19"
               },
               "description":"Subscriptions",
               "trackingRefs":[
                  {
                     "id":"CLASS_5100000000000040021",
                     "dataType":"trackingCategories"
                  },
                  {
                     "id":"DEPARTMENT_5",
                     "dataType":"trackingCategories"
                  }
               ]
                "invoiceTo":{
                  "id":"an-id-to-a-customers-record",
                  "dataType":"customers"
               }
            }
         ]
      }
   ]
}

Billable reimbursable expenses

Your customer may want to mark an expense as billable so that they can easily identify and allocate costs to specific customers or projects. This simplifies the process of invoicing clients for reimbursable expenses.

To mark an expense as billable, set the invoiceTo property to customer. The expense will then reference the customer in the line item.

Compatible integrations

This functionality is currently only available for QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Desktop.

Multicurrency transactions

Sync for Expenses validates each reimbursable expense transaction involving foreign currency. We ensure that the combination of participating currencies will be accepted by the target accounting platform as a valid expense. You can read more about expenses in foreign currency and platform support for different transaction types.

For reimbursable expenses, the currency of the expense is the currency of the supplier (so the currency that the employee will be reimbursed in). If the employee needs to be reimbursed in a different currency, they need to be set up as a new supplier for each required currency.

Default tax rates

If you need to remove an associated tax rate from a reimbursable expense, use one of the following default values that have no impact on the expense:

Platform	Default tax rate
QuickBooks Online	NON
QuickBooks Desktop	Null

Update reimbursable expenses

In some cases, your customer may want to update a reimbursable expense transaction that was previously synced to their accounting platform. Use our Update reimbursable expense transactions endpoint to edit the following parameters and reflect the change in the SMB's accounting software:

• Net expense amount
• Tax amount of the spend
• Tax rate reference associated with the spend
• Expense bank account reference
• Tracking category objects
• Description and notes

Update an expense transaction

PUT  https://api.codat.io/companies/{companyId}/sync/expenses/reimburseable-expense-transactions

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Read next

• Sync the expenses to reflect the spend in the accounting platform and monitor the progress of the synchronization.