Categories and budgets

Everything here lives under Claims → Settings and needs the claim admin permission.

Categories

A category is both the kind of expense (Travel, Meals, Medical) and the rule set that governs it. There’s no separate policy object — the category carries its own rules.

Create one under Categories. A new organization starts with none, so this is the first thing to set up.

Caution

Employees can’t file anything until at least one category exists and a claim approval workflow is active. Check both before telling people the module is open.

What a category controls

• Name and Code — both required. The code is a short internal identifier (TRAVEL, MEALS): uppercase letters, digits and underscores, starting with a letter, up to 32 characters. It has to be unique within the organization — reusing one is refused with “A category with this code already exists”. Unlike a leave type’s code, you can change it later. Reports and the CSV export show the name, not the code, so name categories the way you want them to read.
• Calculation — how a line’s amount is worked out:
  • Amount — the claimant types the figure from the receipt.
  • Mileage — the claimant enters distance, multiplied by the category’s mileage rate (one flat rate for everyone).
  • Per diem — the claimant enters a number of days, multiplied by the per-diem rate for their grade (set per tier, so grades can differ).
• Requires receipt — block submission of a line with no attachment.
• Requires reason — block submission of a line with no description.
• Allowed during probation — when off, employees on probation can’t use this category at all.
• Taxable and EA form box — whether reimbursements are taxable to the employee, and which EA box they report under.
• Payroll component code — the payroll component reimbursements settle through when a claim is paid via a payroll run.
• Active — inactive categories disappear from the claim form but keep their history.

Caps per grade

Caps live on grade tiers, not on the category, so one category can pay different amounts to different grades.

Each tier covers a set of grades and sets:

• Budget — how much one person can claim under this category per budget window.
• Claim limit — the most any single claim can be for.
• Per-diem rate — for per-diem categories.

A default tier acts as the catch-all for grades you haven’t named explicitly. A grade covered by no tier at all is approval-only — people at that grade can still claim, there’s just no budget tracked against them.

Note

A specific tier always beats the default. Changing any cap immediately refreshes the current window’s budget for every active employee — you don’t have to wait for their next claim.

Cutting a cap below what someone has already claimed leaves them over budget: their remaining goes negative and they can’t file anything else in that window until a pending claim is decided. Expenses dated in a different window are unaffected. Nothing already approved is clawed back, and the figure corrects itself — if the claim holding the budget is rejected or withdrawn, the balance returns to the new budget for that window.

Budget windows

The budget year decides the period a budget resets on:

• Calendar — 1 January to 31 December.
• Financial year — starting from the fiscal month you choose.
• Anniversary — each employee’s own join date, so windows differ per person.

A line counts against the window its expense date falls in, not the date it was filed. A claim with lines either side of a year boundary holds against both years’ budgets.

Proration

Prorate budget for mid-year joiners scales a budget to the slice of the window the person is actually there for. It covers joiners, leavers, and mid-window grade changes — someone promoted in July gets their old grade’s budget weighted for the months before and their new grade’s for the months after.

The proration basis sets the grain for the ordinary mid-window joiner:

• Days — the exact day fraction.
• Months (lenient) — the join month counts in full.
• Months (strict) — the join month counts only if they started on the 1st.

Turn proration off and every active employee gets the full budget regardless of when they joined.

Adjusting a balance

Settings → Balances shows one employee’s balances across categories, with the budget, what’s used, what’s held by pending claims, and what’s left.

Adjust balance applies a signed correction — positive to grant extra, negative to claw back. Adjustments need a reason, they’re recorded in the audit trail, and they survive a recompute: changing a category’s caps won’t wipe them out.

Closing a budget window

Settings → Budget close seals a finished period. Closing a window:

• Locks it. New claims with expense dates inside that window are rejected — the employee is told to ask HR to reopen it.
• Snapshots every balance in the window, so you keep a record of what each person’s budget and usage were at close.

Close a window once the last legitimate claims for the period are in and you don’t want late entries changing prior-period numbers.

Reopen window lifts the lock and claims flow again. The original snapshot is kept for audit, and closing again takes a fresh one.

Note

Closing is about filing, not paying. Claims already approved inside a closed window can still be paid normally — the lock only stops new expenses being filed into a sealed period.

Approval workflow

Settings → Workflow is where the claim approval chain is defined — who approves, in what order, and under what conditions. Claims use a single workflow per organization; you can’t run two competing claim workflows at once.