How to file expense sheets I send to my employer

[Geert Janssens]

On Saturday 22 March 2014 16:55:59 allamistakeo18 at mac.com wrote:
> 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.
> 
You're absolutely right. I wasn't paying proper attention. A 'customer' invoice is the best option - 
if you wish to use the business features. They may only be overhead in this case. It depends on 
how you are doing the rest of your accounting.

> 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.
> 
Let's give it another try, assuming you prefer to use the business features.

1. When you make the expense you enter a transaction between your bank/cash account and 
the proper reimbursable expense account.
2. When time comes to submit your expenses to your employer you can create a new invoice 
for your employer.
3. You can add entries for each expense, using the account in the expense currency as transfer 
account. You will want to enter the amounts in the invoice currency (the one your employer 
imposes).
4. For your night-out allowance add an entry using the proper income account as transfer 
account. So don't enter that information directly into the income account as you did - only add it 
on the invoice.
5. Post your invoice. This will ask for a conversion rate for each foreign currency account you 
used. Once posted, your reimbursable expense accounts should have balancing transactions for 
all the expenses you had on the invoice. Your income account should have a record for your 
night-out allowance.
6. When your employer pays out your expenses, pay the invoice from the corresponding bank 
account.

There is one caveat here: the invoice code will only ask for one conversion rate per foreign 
currency. So if your employer uses different conversion rates for different expenses in the same 
foreign currency, you won't be able to reflect this in GnuCash. The only workaround I see for 
this would be to only enter one entry per currency on your invoice. Each entry would be the sum 
of all expenses in the currency. The exchange rate to use would then have to be calculated from 
the total in foreign currency and the total in your employer's currency.

Or skip the invoice stuff altogether and just enter the relevant transactions directly into the 
proper registers. In that case you can control everything.

I hope this makes more sense.

Geert

> 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