How to file expense sheets I send to my employer

[allamistakeo18 at mac.com]

Hi Derek, 

On 24 Mar 2014, at 21:39, Derek Atkins <warlord at MIT.EDU> wrote:

> As an employee what I do with my reimbursible transactions is:
> 
> 1) Create Asset:Business Expenses
> 2) File every reimbursible transaction to A:BE (instead of an expense
>   account, because it's *not* an expense to me)!
> 3) When I file my expense report I mark the transactions "cleared" in my
>   A:BE account.  So the "cleared balance" should always match the
>   outstanding expense report(s) sum.
> 4) When I get paid I reconcile the A:BE account to a value of $0, which
>   should pre-mark the previously reported items.

Thanks for your input. Your method looks a lot like what I have settled for in the end, except that I don’t use a single Asset account, but multiple Receivable accounts (one per currency), which I believe reflects better the fact that the entries correspond to sums that are due to me. Receivable accounts don’t seem to support “clearance” (at least I don’t see that column), but do have a “T” column and a “Due Date” column that could maybe be used to identify whether the expense sheet has been filed yet. I don’t have a lot of use for this, though. 

> This has worked very well for me, but I don't often have multiple
> outstanding expense reports.

I suspect reconciliation would not really work in my case precisely for that reason: I tend to have multiple expense sheets open simultaneously, and I can file a new one before the previous has been paid. 

Best, 

Thomas