Professional services
Expenses
What was spent, who is owed it back, and what a client is charged for it — three facts that are often but not always the same claim.
An expense answers what was spent and, very often, who is owed it back. A charge answers what a client should pay. Most expenses are both and some are only one: a taxi on a personal card for an internal project is a debt to the employee and nothing to any client, while the same taxi on the company card for a client is a charge and no debt at all.
Expenses are approved and time is not, and that is deliberate
It looks like an inconsistency and is a real distinction. A timesheet that argues with the person filling it in is one that stops being filled in, and a slightly wrong timesheet costs a slightly wrong report. An expense is a claim on money — somebody is asking to be paid, and a claim nobody signed off is money leaving on one person's say-so.
Claiming
You record your own only. A draft can be incomplete — somebody photographs a receipt on Tuesday and finishes it on Friday — and a form that refuses to save until everything is right is one people abandon.
Two amounts are recorded: what the card was actually charged, and what is being claimed in the currency you reimburse in. The conversion is yours, not ours — the bank already did it and the figure is on the statement. A rate we applied would differ from what somebody was really charged and leave them out of pocket by the spread.
A missing receipt is recorded, not refused
Small cash items genuinely have none, and a system that refuses them outright gets a photograph of a blank page instead. Saying why keeps the gap visible to whoever approves it and whoever audits it later — and it clears itself the moment a receipt arrives.
Deciding
- Nobody approves their own, whatever role they hold.
- A submitted claim is frozen. Editing the amount afterwards would mean the approver agreed to one figure and a different one was recorded.
- A refusal needs a reason and is never deleted. “Asked and was refused” and “never asked” are different facts.
- Fixing a refused claim returns it to draft, so it does not sit in a refused pile that nobody revisits.
What a client is charged
The charge is written at approval, never at submission — an unapproved expense reaching a client's invoice would bill somebody for a claim nobody agreed to, and the first anybody would know is the client asking about it.
The outlay and the charge are separate figures
What was spent is the cost; what the client pays is that plus any markup. The gap between them is the margin, which is why both are kept. A single figure would make a recharge at cost indistinguishable from one at 15%.
Non-billable spending on a client's work still becomes a charge, marked not chargeable — it was delivered and it cost something, and dropping it is how the cost of servicing an account becomes invisible in the one report meant to show it. Spending with no client at all produces no charge; inventing one would put internal costs on somebody's account.
Being paid back
Only personal money is ever owed back, and only once approved: company money is owed to nobody, and an unapproved claim is a request rather than a debt. What is owed is reported per person and per currency and never netted across either — it is a debt to an individual, so a single total says nothing anybody can act on.
Reimbursement is tracked, not paid
Ergira records what is owed and when it went back, with whatever reference your payer uses. Moving the money is payroll's or the bank's — the same boundary the product keeps about pay itself and about benefit claims.
Who can do what
| Action | Needs |
|---|---|
| Claim your own expenses | A login, and nothing else |
| Approve or refuse a claim | finance:edit — and not being the claimant |
| Record that somebody was paid back | finance:configure |