The lifecycle of an expense report mirrors that of individual expenses. Once an expense report is created, its expense owner can submit it for approval. Approvers can either approve the report, advancing it to the review step, or decline it. If declined, the approver can delete or return the report to the expense owner for further updates and resubmission.
Reviewing expense reports
Employees assigned as reviewers in your company’s workflows can review expense reports.
If there are any issues, such as missing required fields, Payhawk will display an error message and prevent the report from being reviewed until the errors are resolved.
In the Payhawk web portal, go to Expenses > Review.
Select the desired report.
Click on Review.
Editing expense reports
Expense reports in Payhawk can be edited before they have been paid by different roles at your company, and depending on the stage of their lifecycle:
Expense report owners can edit a report during one of these stages:
Before the expense report has been submitted.
After the expense report was sent for approval, but editing the report at this stage will cancel any existing approvals and restart the approval process.
When the expense report has been returned to them for updates.
Employees assigned as reviewers, as well as Payhawk accountants and administrators, can also edit an expense report.
As an expense report owner, you can edit your expense reports before they've been submitted or after they've been returned for updates, by following these steps:
In the Payhawk web portal, go to Expenses > Submit and select the report.
Click on its three-dot menu and select Edit report.
In the dialog that opens, modify the desired details.
Click on Save.
If you’ve submitted your expense report for approval and at least one expense has already been approved, you can recall and edit the expense report in the following way:
In the Payhawk web portal, go to Expenses > All and select the report.
Click on its three-dot menu and select Edit report.
Click on Confirm.
In the dialog that opens, modify the desired details.
Click on Save.
If you are assigned as an expense reviewer or as a Payhawk accountant or administrator, you can edit an expense report in the following way:
In the Payhawk web portal, go to Expenses > Review.
Select the desired report.
Click on its three-dot menu and select Edit report.
In the dialog that opens, modify the desired details.
Select the checkbox to allow the related expenses to be updated correspondingly based on the latest expense report conditions.
Click on Save.
Deleting expense reports
Expense reports in Payhawk can be deleted as long as they haven’t been paid. When a report is deleted, any linked expenses will be unlinked and, if they are still in the approval process, automatically resubmitted for approval.
While expenses and expense reports cannot be deleted after payment, they can still be returned for review. This allows the Finance team to take appropriate actions, such as deducting the amount from the employee's payroll or arranging a reimbursement via bank transfer to the company account.
At the different stages of their lifecycle, expense reports can be deleted by different roles at your company:
Expense owners can delete a report before it's been submitted or if it has been returned to them for updates.
Employees assigned as reviewers, as well as Payhawk accountants and administrators, can delete an expense report from the Delete option of the three-dot menu.
As an expense owner, you can delete your expense report before submitting it, or if it's been returned to you.
In the Payhawk web portal, go to Expenses > Submit and select the report.
Click on its three-dot menu and select Delete.
In the dialog that opens, click on Delete to confirm your choice.
Deleting an expense report will unlink all associated expenses. Expenses that were already submitted will be automatically resubmitted for approval, while the rest will remain in their current state.
You can still delete the included expenses individually.
If you are assigned as an expense reviewer, you can delete an expense report in the following way:
In the Payhawk web portal, go to Expenses > Review.
Select the desired report.
Click on its three-dot menu and select Delete.
In the dialog that opens, select Delete to confirm the action.
Downloading expense reports
While downloading expense reports is not currently supported out of the box, you can work around this issue and download an expense report based on its ID.
First, you need to export and download the export file:
In the Payhawk portal, go to Export.
Export your expenses for the desired period. The export file that was downloaded on your device will contain the Export report ID column.
Then, filter out the desired expense report based on its ID and download it:
Go to Expenses.
Filter by Expense report ID.
Click on Download.
Filtering and exporting expense reports
If the Expense Reports feature has been enabled for your account, you'll be able to do the following in the Payhawk web portal:
Filter your expenses from the Expenses app based on the Expense report filter.
Include your expense reports in the custom export files under the EXPENSE options group of the Rows group, Line items, and Expense payment cell type data based on the Expense report ID option.