How to file expense sheets I send to my employer

[allamistakeo18 at mac.com]

Dag Geert, 

Thanks for your prompt input. Your suggested approach already looks better than mine, but still a bit far fetched, because it involves treating my employer as an employee in GnuCash. This is counter-intuitive to me: this “expense voucher” feature is listed under the menu “Employee,” so I would expect it to be used in the other direction, for when I have to pay someone who sent me an expense voucher. This is why I hadn’t even tried this feature yet. From intuition, the menu “Customer” and its “invoices" were the closest I could find to what I wanted: my employer is a bit like a customer who ends up paying me, and not the reverse. 

Nevertheless, I have given the expense voucher a try, and while it seems it could do the job for expenses, I don’t see how to enter night-out allowances, since each line in the expense voucher has to be written against an expense account. But night-out allowances are not expenses. The only workaround I could think of would be to enter a transfer from an income account to an arbitrary expense account. This seems like a counter-intuitive hack. 

Thanks again for your suggestions. 

Thomas 

On 22 Mar 2014, at 14:21, Geert Janssens <janssens-geert at telenet.be> wrote:

> On Saturday 22 March 2014 09:49:52 allamistakeo18 at mac.com wrote:
> 
> > 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?
> > 
>  
> Instead I would
> 1. create an expense voucher and add each expense against Expense Account in their corresponding currencies (you may have to enter the amount  in your employer's imposed currency though, I'm not sure)
> 2. Post the expense voucher. This should ask you for conversion rates for each expense not in the post account's currency
> 3. Pay the voucher once you get actually reimbursed as you explain.
>  
> Is this not working for you ?
>  
> Geert