On the submit, approve, and review steps of the expense lifecycle, you can split card expenses and ATM withdrawals made for goods or services from two or more suppliers as long as the desired card expenses meet a set of requirements.
As an example, you may have ordered 10 books from an online bookstore and paid for them with a single card transaction; however, the books are delivered by several different suppliers, each supplier issues an invoice for the respective books and their amounts, and the invoices are received asynchronously as the books arrive over a period of time.
Normally, you can split the expense into line items when you receive all invoices, and review and export them to your ERP system. You'll then need to go to the accounting software and manually edit all exported lines to set the right supplier, document date, and document number.
In contrast, by splitting this single card expense into multiple expenses, you'll be able to review and export only the expenses for which you have received the invoices without the need for additional manual work in your accounting system after the posting of the expense there as all required expense data will have already been submitted during the split.
Splitting card expenses into multiple expenses is supported only on the Payhawk web portal.
Requirements for expense split
You can split an expense with a card transaction into multiple expenses in Payhawk if it meets the following requirements:
Is a card expense, meaning, there's already a card transaction in Payhawk.
Is not a reviewed expense.
Has no related subscription.
Has no line items.
The expense split functionality is currently supported for some of the available Payhwk-ERP direct integrations. For the unsupported ones, the system will display a popup for you to note when attempting to split your card transactions into multiple expenses.
Expense split and expense merge
You can reverse an expense split by using the expense merge operation. For more information, see the article about merging expenses in Payhawk.
Expense split output
After the expense split, the resulting expenses will have the following characteristics:
The cumulative amount of all expenses will be equal to the amount of the initial expense.
The new expenses will be created with a link to the same transaction. You will be able to split an expense with multiple transactions too.
The creation date of the split expenses will be the date of the expense split operation.
The expense categorization and other properties will be inherited from the initial expense.
In the Expenses app, each split expense will display a Paid together with X other expense(s) information panel and will contain a hyperlink to the Payment ID filter.
If the card expense has an already attached expense document, it will be kept and attached to the first expense after the split.
If a card expense has been approved and then split into expenses, its status will change and it will have to be submitted again.
If the initial expense has been approved, all new expenses will be reset to a "Not submitted" status.
If an expense has already been split from another expense, it will link to the transactions from the previous split. For example, if Expense A with Transaction T is split into Expenses A1 and A2, and Expense A1 is split into Expenses A3 and A4, this will result in Expenses A2, A3, and A4 linked to Transaction T.
If the amount of the split expenses has been updated and the sum no longer matches the amount of the transaction, Payhawk will display a warning for you to handle. Split expenses with warnings for amount mismatch cannot be reviewed in bulk.
Splitting into multiple expenses
To split a card expense or an ATM withdrawal into multiple expenses:
In the Payhawk web portal, go to the Expenses > Submit, Approve, or Review tab.
Select the desired expense and click on its three-dot menu.
Select the Split into multiple expenses option. As a result and by default, the system will split the expense into two.
Fill in the notes and amounts of each split expense. If you need to add another split expense, click on the + Add expense button. For your convenience - adding new lines and updating the amounts will automatically deduct from the first expense.
When ready, click on the Split into [number] expenses.
If a discrepancy occurs while splitting and editing the expenses, Payhawk will display an error for you to handle.
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