Project expenses, mileage and reimbursements

Overview

What it does, in short: expense tracking you can bill back.

Everyone in the workspace can log expenses. Members, contractors and managers see and edit their own. Owners and admins see everyone’s, and get a “Person” filter to narrow the list.

The page lives under Expenses in the menu. If you don’t see it, an admin has turned the module off under Workspace settings → “Modules”.

Add an expense

Click “New expense” and fill in the drawer. Pick a “Project” (you can only pick projects you’re a member of, while owners and admins can pick any active project), a “Date” and, optionally, a “Category”. Enter the “Amount” in the client’s currency and any “Notes”, for example “Train to the client workshop”.

“Billable to the client” is ticked by default; untick it for costs you absorb. Tick “Reimburse me” for money you paid out of your own pocket. A “Receipt” can be PNG, JPEG, WebP or PDF, up to 10 MB.

With the assistant on, a new expense starts with the “Receipt”: pick the file and press “Let Pip read it”. Pip reads the date, the total and the merchant and fills in “Date”, “Amount”, “Notes” and, when one of your category names fits, “Category”. Nothing is saved until you check the fields and press “Save expense”, and the receipt is attached as usual. If the receipt is in another currency than the project’s, Pip says so: change the amount to the client’s currency yourself. The file is sent to Anthropic to be read, the same as a message to the assistant; an admin can turn the assistant off under Workspace settings.

To change an expense, click “Edit” on its row. From there you can upload a new receipt, tick “Remove the current receipt”, or “Delete” the expense.

Receipts

A paperclip icon on the row opens the receipt. Receipts are private to the workspace: only a signed-in member of your workspace can open one. A copied link returns “not found” for anyone else.

Categories

The first time anyone opens Expenses, Sumhour creates five categories: Travel, Meals, Software, Materials and Other. Owners and admins manage the list from the “Categories” button.

Under “Add a category”, give it a “Name”. “Unit” and “Price per unit” are optional, and adding them turns it into a per-unit category. Click “Add category”. Archiving a category hides it from the picker but keeps it on past expenses, and you can restore it.

Mileage and other per-unit costs

Say you add a category called Mileage with unit km and price 0.45. When someone picks it, the drawer shows a field named after the unit (“Km”) with the price next to it. Enter the distance and leave “Amount” blank: Sumhour works it out as units × price, so 120 km becomes 54.00. If you type an amount yourself, that amount wins.

If a per-unit category has neither units nor an amount, the save is refused with “Enter an amount, or units for a per-unit category.”

Expense approval

Approval is off by default. An admin turns it on under Workspace settings → “Approvals” with “Expenses need approval before they are invoiced or reimbursed”.

With it on:

• Each new expense shows “Awaiting approval”, and owners, admins and managers get a notification.
• A “To approve” tab appears for owners, admins and managers, with the count of waiting expenses.
• Each row there has “Approve” and “Reject”. Rejecting needs a reason in the “Reason if rejecting” box.
• The person who logged it gets a notification either way, and a rejected expense shows “Rejected” with the reason on hover.
• Only approved expenses reach invoices and the reimbursement list.

With it off, nothing waits. Expenses go straight to billing and reimbursement.

Reimburse people

The “To reimburse” tab lists every open “Reimburse me” expense, grouped by person, with their total and count. Everyone except owners and admins sees only their own list. With approval on, an expense appears there only once it’s approved.

When you’ve paid someone back, an owner or admin clicks “Mark reimbursed” on that person’s group. It marks all of that person’s open expenses as reimbursed in one go; picking single items isn’t supported. The row then shows “Reimbursed” instead of “Reimburse”.

Bill expenses on invoices

Billable expenses go to the client through the invoice builder. When you draft an invoice with “Include billable expenses” ticked (it is by default), Sumhour adds every expense that is:

• marked “Billable to the client”,
• on one of the projects you picked,
• dated inside the invoice’s date range,
• not already on an invoice and not rejected,
• approved, when approval is on.

Each becomes its own line, described as project, category, notes and date, at quantity 1. Expense lines are not taxable by default, since you’re passing a cost on rather than selling it. You can change that on the line. See invoicing for the rest of the builder.

Once an expense is on an invoice, its row shows a lock (“On an invoice”) and it can’t be edited or deleted. Removing the line, deleting the draft or voiding the invoice releases it.

Filter and export

The list opens on the last 90 days. Change “From”, “To”, “Project” and (for owners and admins) “Person”, then click “Show”. The page header shows the total for the range.

“CSV” downloads exactly what the filters show. The file has one row per expense with these columns: Date, Person, Client, Project, Category, Units, Amount, Currency, Billable, Reimbursable, Reimbursed on, Invoiced, Notes and Receipt. It opens cleanly in Excel. Members get only their own expenses in the file.

For invoice and payment exports, see invoicing.