How to file expense sheets I send to my employer

[allamistakeo18 at mac.com]

Hi, 

I have been trying various ways to achieve the following, but none has been satisfactory, so I am now posting this request for suggestions. 

I am an employee. Occasionally I have expenses that I can claim reimbursement for from my employer. Sometimes these expenses are made in a different currency from the one my employer uses to reimburse me, and in that case the conversion rate is imposed to me by the internal website I am required to use to file my expenses. Most of the time, an expense sheet also includes a night-out allowance, which does not correspond to any expense I made, but to an additional salary I can claim for having had to travel. 

How do I properly file such an expense claim in GnuCash? 

I have tried various things; the best I could find so far is still the following, overly complicated and unsatisfactory hack. 
- I have a Receivable account for my employer in the currency that I get reimbursed in. 
- Under this Receivable account, I have sub-accounts, one per currency that I made reimbursable expenses in. To achieve what I wanted I had to make these sub-accounts Asset accounts. 

Then my current process is the following: 
1) I book each expense against the Asset sub-account corresponding to the currency I used in my expense. 
2) I book night-out allowances in an income account against the corresponding sub-account. 
3) I create an invoice. The income account against which is expense is written is irrelevant, because I never post the invoice. Each expense is written in the currency of the reimbursement. 
4) For each expense, I make a transfer between the sub-accounts using the expense rate imposed by my employer to gather all expenses on the sub-account with the currency corresponding of reimbursement. 
5) I make a single transfer from that sub-account to the top-level Receivable account. 
5) When I finally get reimbursed, I pay the invoice to my Bank account against the top-level Receivable account. 

This process is overly complicated. I have thought about it, and what I think would make most sense (but I don’t know how to achieve this) is the following: 
1) I book my expenses against Expense accounts in the corresponding currencies. 
2) I create an “expense sheet” (what would be the equivalent of this in GnuCash?) in which I write each expense in the currency of reimbursement, against the Expense account in which I booked the expense, specifying the expense rate imposed by my employer. 
3) I post the expense sheet against a single Receivable account for my employer, hereby exactly compensating my expenses in my Expense accounts. 
4) When I actually get reimbursed, I transfer the money from the Receivable account to my Bank account. 

Thanks in advance for your suggestions, 

Thomas