Expenses in Productive let you keep tabs on and control extra costs associated with your sales deals and budgets.
You can bill them to clients if needed, and keep track of their specifics—such as the amount, date, and description—in the reports or in the Financials tab under Company expenses.
Accessing the Expense Input Screen
You can access the expense input screen by:
Navigating to the Financials tab > Expenses
Using the Quick Add option > Expense
Going to the Expenses tab in the budget > + Expense
Clicking on the three-dot menu in the service line item > Add expense
Adding Expense Details
After accessing the expense input screen, you will need to specify details such as the expense's service, cost, and markup (if billing to your client). You can also modify the expense's submission date and select the person associated with the expense.
You will need to add a brief description of the expense to help you monitor it later. This information will serve as the expense identifier in the reports and under Company expenses.
If you added Expense custom fields to help you categorize your expenses better (e.g. adding a multi-select field with "Travel", "Software", "Education" as expense types), you'll be able to fill them in here.
Add an attachment 📎, such as invoices from third parties related to this specific expense.
Additionally, if you've activated the Payment and Reimbursement toggles in Settings > Expenses, you can set additional parameters such as reimbursement requirements, payment due dates, and payment dates.
Optionally, you can include Vendor information, which refers to a saved company in CRM > Companies that provided the service related to the expense. For example, this could be the airline from which you purchased plane tickets for the travel expense you are submitting.
Once you've entered all the required information, click "Create expense" to proceed with submitting the expense.
If you are logging an expense against a budget that has expense approvals enabled, the budget owner will review your request for expenses.
See this article for further information on expense approvals!
Autofilling Expense Details with AI
Save time with the "Upload to Autofill" option, where Productive AI scans your uploaded file and fills in key expense details for you!
Important: Enable Expense Tracking on the Service!
Before logging any expenses, make sure that expense tracking is activated for the service you are associating the expense with. Otherwise, you won't be able to record any expenses for the service, and it won't appear in the "Service" dropdown in the expense input screen!
To verify whether expense tracking is enabled for the service, access the budget editor by clicking "Edit" and then hover over the expense tracking icon (🧾).
Tip: Notify the Budget Owner or Admin for Missing Services
If you don't see a service in the expense dropdown and lack permission to check its expense tracking status, contact the budget owner or account admin for assistance.
Tracking Expenses and Billing Types
You can track expenses on services with a Fixed, Time and Materials, as well as for the Non-billable billing type as long as you select piece as the tracking unit:
Fixed billing type budgets and services will be billed in their entirety (the entire budget you set up), no matter how many expenses and hours you log.
Time and Materials budgets and services allow you to bill only for the logged hours and expenses, meaning you need to log hours and expenses as your work progresses to be able to invoice it to your client.
Non-billable expenses cannot be billed to your client and produce cost only.
