You can use PayFit's expenses feature to to manage employee expenses on PayFit and reimburse employees via payroll.
Feature Overview: Expenses
✅ Using PayFit for expense management reduces admin workload as employees submit their expenses directly into their employee portal. Once approved, the expense goes straight onto the employee's payslip and is paid as part of their monthly income.
✅ Employees can scan their receipts and the fields are automatically populated to make the process quicker.
✅ The employee can see a full log of every expense they've submitted, whether this has been approved / rejected / cancelled / pending so it's easy to track what has been submitted.
✅ Once an expense has been requested, managers are notified via email straight away. Once a manager has approved or declined an expense request, the employee is also notified via email.
✅ Admins can set limits or warnings for each expense category. These are visible to an employee to reduce time spent rejecting expenses that aren't covered under the company policy.
✅ Admins can set up a management structure so a manager can approve expenses from their direct reports as well as the expenses being visible in the admin space.
✅ Admins can make receipts and/or comments compulsory to ensure that they have all the details they need when validating expenses.
✅ Admins can create Expense reports by using the Custom Reports functionality.
✅ Expenses can be reported in payroll journals.
❌ Currently, the expense categories are pre-set and can't be changed or added to.
❌ There's only one level of approval so you're not able to set up multi-layer authentication for expense requests.
❌ Expenses are processed via payroll on a monthly basis - out of cycle payments aren't currently be supported.
By default, PayFit makes expenses not taxable and NI-able. You can adjust this on a case-by-case basis.
Activate the expenses module for employees
From the left, choose Pay items, then Expenses.
If a padlock icon appears next to expenses, your package may not yet include the Expenses feature. To discuss this. please reach our to us via the Contact Us form.
Click Expenses settings in the top-right.
Click Manage Activation in the top right.
Under the Activation column, click the Toggle to enable the feature for each employee.
Click Close.
The employee(s) will receive an email notification to confirm they can now submit their expenses via their employee space under the Expenses section.
Setting expense policies
From the left, choose Pay items, then Expenses.
Click Expenses settings in the top-right.
Here, you can set overall parameters for expenses e.g. blocking expenses over £200.
Alternatively, you can click New Policy to set expense parameters per category.
Choose the category type from the list and choose the parameters you'd like to apply.
When an employee submits an expense, they'll choose the relevant category and be restricted by the rules provided by the admin.
Methods of submit expenses
There are four ways to submit expenses through PayFit:
1️⃣ Receipt scanning (OCR) via the employee space.
2️⃣ Manually inputting details of the receipt via the Employee Space.
3️⃣ Admins can directly input an expense in the employee space.
4️⃣ Admins can bulk upload employee expenses.
1️⃣ Receipt Scanning (OCR)
Receipt scanning allows employees to either upload or take a photo of their receipt with their phone without having to manually fill in all the details.
To do this, they can choose the Add my receipt function, at which point the app will then auto-populate the relevant fields thanks to the optical character recognition (OCR) technology.
2️⃣ Manual submissions of receipts
Using this option, employees can manually add expenses by uploading their receipts.
In the expenses section of their employee space, they can manually enter the necessary information for each expense and submit the total amount to be reimbursed.
Multi-currency expenses
Employees can submit expenses in a foreign currency and convert the amount to the local currency. The conversion uses the European Central Bank rate on the date of the expense.
3️⃣ Admins Inputting Expenses in the Employee Space
In the admin space, head to My Employees > Pay Items > Expenses.
You're able to input details of the expense and choose whether it needs to be subject to tax or NI. More information on what is considered a taxable or NI-able benefit can be found here.
4️⃣ Admins Bulk Uploading Employee Expenses
Admins can upload employee expenses in bulk. This is particularly useful if you are transitioning between systems and would like to log upcoming expenses that have already been submitted by employees.
To do this, head to My Company > Imports > More Imports > choose either business travel mileage allowance or other expenses sheet > download and input information > re-upload into PayFit.
Approving expenses
Admins and managers (depending on defined validation and view workflows) will receive a notification to approve or reject the expense request.
The manager can either validate the expenses in bulk or validate each expense one at a time.
To validate in bulk:
To validate one at a time:
Monthly summary of my employees' expenses
In the expenses section, you can view a detailed overview of expenses by month and by category. All the receipts for each month can be downloaded with one click.
To keep control of this expense item, you can track its evolution by comparing the total sum of expenses for the current month vs. the previous month.
The detailed view allows you to track each expense report month by month.
The export button allows you to download an Excel file with a summary of all expenses for the detailed month: cost, category, VAT, etc. This document can be very useful for both you and your accountant.
How to modify a validated expense
As an admin, you're entitled to modify or cancel an expense that has already been validated.
From the left, choose Pay items, then Expenses.
Under the Monthly Summary section, click Edit.
Next to the relevant employee, click See all.
Click the Actions (...) button to edit or delete the expense as needed.
Click Save.
When you change an expense, the employee isn't notified by PayFit so you'll need to inform the employee of any change you make as an admin.