Productive lets you log expenses against budget services from several places in the app. This article walks you through the expense input screen and everything you can fill in when submitting an expense.
Before You Start
Before submitting an expense, make sure:
The service is set up with piece as the tracking unit.
Expense tracking is enabled for the service. To check, open the budget editor and hover over the expense tracking icon (🧾).
📌 If you don't see a service in the expense dropdown and can't check its settings, contact the budget owner or account admin.
👉 See How to Set Up an Expense Line Item in a Budget for details on configuring the service.
👉 Not sure where to find the expense input screen? See Where to Find the Expense Input Screen in Productive.
👉 Running into issues? See Can't Log an Expense?
📌 Important: We're updating the Expenses input screen as part of a beta release. What you see in this article may not reflect what's available in your account.
Adding Expense Details
Open the New Expense screen and fill in the following fields:
Author - The person associated with the expense.
Date of expense - The date when the expense occurred.
Currency - The currency in which the expense was incurred.
Vendor (Optional) - 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.
Next, complete the Budget & Tracking section:
Service - The budget service line to log the expense against.
Reference - A short internal label to help you identify the expense.
Due date - The date the expense is expected to be paid.
📌 The subsidiary linked to the selected budget will automatically appear below the Service field.
If you've set up expense custom fields to help you categorize your expenses better (for example, adding a multi-select field with "Travel", "Software", "Education" as expense categories), you'll be able to fill them in the Custom fields section.
Payment and Reimbursement
If you've enabled the Payment and Reimbursement toggles in Settings > Expenses, you can mark the expense as paid, enter a payment date, or flag it as reimbursable.
📌 To enter a reimbursement date, both toggles must be enabled. The date field serves as both the payment date and the reimbursement date — it records when the expense was settled, whether paid by the company or reimbursed to the employee.
Adding Line Items
You can add single or multiple line items, allowing you to break down a single expense into individual cost components — useful for things like itemized invoices or receipts with several products or services.
Totals update automatically in the summary panel at the bottom right.
Each line item must contain:
Description - What the line item covers.
Unit price - The cost per unit.
Quantity - The number of units.
Tax rate - The applicable tax rate.
Total cost - Calculated automatically based on unit price and quantity.
To add more line items, click + Add line item.
📌 Each line item can be duplicated.
You can toggle the total between including or excluding tax, and apply a markup if the expense is billable to a client.
Including vs. Excluding Tax
The toggle controls what your unit price represents:
Including tax: the price already contains tax. Productive extracts the tax portion for you (e.g. $100 with 20% VAT = $83.33 net + $16.67 tax, total stays $100).
Excluding tax: the price is before tax. Productive adds tax on top (e.g. $100 with 20% VAT = $20 tax, total becomes $120).
Match the toggle to your receipt: if it shows "$100 total (VAT included)" use including tax; if it shows "$100 + VAT" use excluding tax.
Markup
If the expense is billable to a client, you can apply a markup to charge more than the base cost. For example, a 10% markup on a $100 expense bills the client $110.
The markup and total billable fields only appear when a billable service is selected.
📌 You can set a default markup in Settings to avoid entering it manually each time.
Attachments
You can attach a file (such as a third-party invoice) to the expense.
📌 Only one file can be uploaded as an attachment. To attach more files, add a file custom field to the expense.
Submitting the Expense
Once all required fields are filled in, click Submit.
If the budget has expense approvals enabled, the designated approver will review your submission before it's confirmed.
👉 Learn more about Expense Approvals.
Autofill with AI
Use the Upload to Autofill option to have Productive AI scan an uploaded file and fill in key expense details automatically.
Duplicating an Expense
You can duplicate an existing expense to reuse its details without re-entering everything from scratch.
👉 Learn more in the How to Duplicate an Expense article.
