Expenses in Productive allow you to track and manage additional costs related to your budgets and sales deals.
You can categorize them by client, track their details such as amount, date, and description in the reports or in the Financials tab under Company expenses, and even bill them to clients if necessary.
Discover how to set up expense-related account settings in the article below.
Expenses Settings
If you are an admin or the account owner (or if you have custom expense permissions enabled), you can access the expense settings through Settings > Expenses.
There, you can customize several options:
Enable the Expenses approval functionality to set up an approval process for added expenses on a budget.
Leaving this unchecked (toggle off) still allows expense logging, with all expenses approved by default.
If you wish to verify expenses before adding them to the budget, switch the toggle on and check out this article on expense approvals.
Enable the Payment functionality to track expense payments, adding this field to the expense input section.
Activate the Reimbursement toggle to include the reimbursement option in your expense input section, helping with reimbursement requests when adding expenses.
Define a global expense markup, if needed, to apply to all your expenses uniformly.
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, ensure that Expense tracking is activated for the service you want to associate the expense with. Otherwise, you won't be able to record any expenses for that service!
To check whether expense tracking is on for the service, access the budget editor by clicking "Edit" and hovering over the expense tracking icon (🧾).
Tip: 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.
Expenses Overview
Navigate to Financials > Expenses to access your company's complete expense list.
Use filters and views to easily identify expenses that require reimbursement or further attention!
In the Reports section, choose the Expenses data source for a comprehensive view of submitted expenses. Alternatively, integrate this data into Financial items data source reports for broader financial insights.
Tip: For daily expense monitoring, customize and save your preferred report (using either the Expense or Financial items data source), then add it to your home dashboard as a widget for quick access and oversight.
Additionally, when adding a widget from the Widget library, you'll see one entitled "Company expenses", allowing you to oversee expenses on currently open projects.
