Expenses in Productive let you track and manage additional costs related to your budgets and deals.

You can categorize them by client, view details like amount, date, and description in Reports or in Financials > Expenses, and bill them to clients when needed.

This article covers the account-level settings that control how expenses work across your organization.

Go to Settings > Expenses to manage account-level expense configuration.

📌 You need admin or owner permissions, or a custom permission set with expense permissions enabled, to access these settings.
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Enable Expense Approval to require review before expenses are confirmed on a budget or deal. When this toggle is off, all submitted expenses are approved by default.

Instead of assigning approvers manually to each budget or deal, you can manage approvals through Approval Policies. Policies define who approves expenses submitted on a budget or deal. For example, the submitter's manager, the budget owner, or the project manager.

Approval policies are configured in Settings > Budget or Settings > Deal, not on this page.

👉 See Expense Approval: Setup and Flow for full instructions on setting up policies and assigning approvers.

Enable this to add a payment status field to the expense input screen. Once active, users will see an Unpaid / Paid toggle on each expense. After marking an expense as paid, they can also enter the date the payment was made.

📌 If your account is connected to Xero or QuickBooks Online, this toggle is always enabled and cannot be disabled — the integration uses this field to sync payment status from your accounting tool.

Enable this to allow users to mark expenses as reimbursable.

When an expense is set to reimbursable, the payment field renames from Unpaid / Paid to Not reimbursed / Reimbursed, tracking whether your organization has reimbursed the expense author rather than paid a vendor.

👉 See How to Submit an Expense for a full breakdown of how the payment and reimbursement fields work together.

Set a global markup percentage to apply to all expenses by default. Users can still override this per expense if needed.

The Allow delivering this budget with unapproved or rejected expenses option can be enabled per budget to allow delivery even when some expenses are still pending or rejected.

Here's how approval status affects cost and billable amounts:

📌 For expenses on non-billable services, no billable amount is generated regardless of approval status.

📌 To set this as the default for all new budgets, go to Settings > Budget and look for the Expenses Settings Defaults section. Otherwise, enable it per budget.

Once you've configured account-level expense settings, set up an expense line item in the relevant budget or deal. This lets your team log and categorize expenses against it.

You can track expenses on services with Fixed, Time and Materials, or Non-billable billing types, as long as the tracking unit is set to piece.

👉 Follow this guide to learn how to add an expense to your budgets.

Use the Upload to Autofill option to have Productive AI scan an uploaded file and fill in key expense details automatically.
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👉 Learn more about Productive AI and expenses here.
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Go to Financials > Expenses to see your organization's full expense list.

Use filters and views to quickly identify expenses that need reimbursement or further action.

📌 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.