Your company may receive an invoice containing expenses related to different pre-defined expense categories, teams, tax rates, or custom fields such as Cost center or Project.
In such cases, you can split expenses that are not yet reviewed into multiple line items, so that you can maintain the correct expense categorization data on each line.
In Payhawk, employees can split expenses into line items too. If your workflows are configured to require approval by a team or custom field manager, Payhawk will send expense requests to all relevant approvers based on the data in all line items. For more information, see the article about defining custom approval workflows.
Pro tip
To save time and effort, you can assign a category to the expense before splitting so that it automatically applies to all line items.
Manually splitting an expense into line items
To split an expense into multiple line items:
In the Payhawk web portal, go to Expenses.
Select the desired expense by clicking on it.
Click on the three-dot menu and select the Split into line items option.
Enter the required data for each line item, for example:
Expense category.
Custom fields such as Cost center and Project.
The amount for each line item. Make sure that the amounts add up to the correct total.
Pro tip
Instead of entering the exact amount, you can input the percentage that the line item's cost represents of the expense total - for example, go to the line item, select Total amount, and type 50%. The system will then automatically calculate the amount and subtract it from the total.
Tax rate.
Click on Save to confirm your changes.
Smart expense line items split
Apart from the option for you to manually fill in the data for each line item, you can also use smart tools when splitting the expense to reduce the manual work.
The smart split tools are available in the Payhawk web portal only.
Fetching line items from a linked purchase order - After selecting the Split into line items option, click on the three-dot menu and, then, on Purchase order items.
The option is available only if the expense is linked to a purchase order.
Fetching line items from the document tax rate - After selecting the Split into line items option, click on the three-dot menu and, then, on Document tax rate.
The option is available only if the Payhawk AI has detected multiple tax rates on the document.
Fetching line items from the document lines - After selecting the Split into line items option, click on the three-dot menu and, then, on Document lines.
Fetching line items from a previous expense - After selecting the Split into line items option, click on the three-dot menu and, then, on Previous expense. Select the expense from which you want to fetch the line items.
The option is available only if you have expenses with multiple lines from the selected supplier.
Splitting line items equally - After selecting the Split into line items option, click on the three-dot menu and, then, on Split the amounts equally.
To view, edit, or delete a line item, click on the number of items under the amount of the expense, or under Amount, or through the three-dot menu at the top.
Splitting expenses into line items from a linked purchase order
When an expense is linked to a purchase order that has multiple items, you can split the expense into line items from the Purchase order > Categorization field of that expense.
If the Split into [number] line items option is selected, it will lead to the following actions:
The number of line items that will be added to the expense will be the same as the number of line items in the purchase order.
The line item notes of the expense will be populated with the descriptions of the purchase order items.
The line item categorization fields of the expense will be populated with the purchase order item fields - category, team, amortization, and custom fields.
If the net amount of the expense matches the amount of the purchase order, the splitting will populate the net amounts of the expense line items by using the item amounts of the purchase order.
Merging line items
You can also merge some of the expense line items:
In the Expenses app, select the desired expense.
Above its line items, click on SELECT.
Select the checkboxes of the line items you want to merge and click on MERGE.
Alternatively, to cancel the line item merge, click on CANCEL.
In the flyout dialog, select the target line item from the drop-down list where you want to merge the selected line items.
Click on Merge.
When back to the expense, click on Save.
