Expenses¶

1. Purpose¶

Expenses handles money staff spend on the company's behalf — travel, fuel, meals, small purchases — and the process of claiming it back. An employee records what they spent, a manager approves it, and accounting posts it and reimburses.

It matters because these costs otherwise arrive as a pile of receipts with no approval trail and no reliable cost centre, and they are exactly the costs a client most wants visibility over.

2. Features¶

Expense records against an expense product, carrying amount, date and description
Receipt attachment on each expense, including by email to an alias
Expense reports grouping several expenses into one submission
Approval workflow — submitted, approved by manager, posted by accounting, paid
Two payment modes: paid by the employee and reimbursed, or paid directly by the company
Posting to the correct expense account, taken from the expense product
Analytic distribution, so expenses land on the right cost centre or department
Reimbursement through a normal accounting payment
Reporting by employee, category, department and period
Multi-currency expenses

3. Where to find it¶

Menu: Expenses → My Expenses / Expense Reports / Configuration
Technical name: hr_expense
Tier: Odoo core (Community Edition)
Available in: Odoo 17 and 18 in our stack

4. Modules used¶

Module	Tier	Why it is needed
`hr_expense`	Odoo core	Expenses, expense reports, the approval workflow
`hr`	Odoo core	The employee claiming, and their manager for approval
`account`	Odoo core	Posting the expense and paying the reimbursement
`analytic`	Odoo core	Cost-centre allocation of expenses
`hr_multi_company`	Third-party (Cybrosys)	Expense handling across companies
`ohrms_core`	Third-party (Cybrosys)	Pulls `hr_expense` into the OpenHRMS suite

NestERP custom modules that build on Expenses¶

Module	Odoo version	What it adds
`thalia_mgmt_dashboard_v17`	17	Expense figures in the consolidated management dashboard
`direct_budget_management`	17	Budget comparison that expenses count against

5. Configuration¶

Prerequisite — employees must exist with a manager set. The manager is the approver; without one, submitted expenses have nobody to approve them.
Create expense products — Expenses → Configuration → Expense Products. One per expense category: fuel, travel, accommodation, meals, stationery. Each carries the expense account it posts to, its cost, and its taxes.
Decide the cost basis per product — a fixed unit cost (per kilometre, per night) or an amount the employee enters.
Set the reimbursement journal and payment method in Accounting.
Configure the email alias if the client wants employees to submit receipts by email.
Enable analytic accounting and create the analytic accounts if expenses must be attributed to departments, branches or projects.
Confirm the approval chain — by default the employee's manager approves and an Expense Administrator posts.

Configuration traps

The expense account comes from the expense product. A generic "Expenses" product dumps everything into one account and destroys the point of the exercise.
An employee with no manager cannot get approval. The report sits submitted indefinitely.
"Paid by company" versus "paid by employee" changes the accounting entirely — one creates a payable to the employee, the other does not. Setting it wrongly produces reimbursements for money the company already spent.
Analytic distribution is not mandatory by default, so cost-centre reporting quietly has gaps unless it is enforced.

6. How it's used¶

Employee — Expenses → My Expenses → New. Selects the expense product, enters the amount and date, attaches the receipt.
Employee — groups expenses into a report and clicks Submit to Manager.
Manager — reviews and Approves, or refuses with a reason.
Accountant — Posts Journal Entries. The expense hits the expense account and, if paid by the employee, creates a payable to them.
Accountant — Registers Payment to reimburse the employee.

Screenshots needed

Save to docs/assets/expenses/: My Expenses list · an expense with a receipt attached · an expense report awaiting approval · expense products configuration · a posted journal entry from an expense.

7. Access rights¶

Group	Can do
Expenses / Employee	Create and submit their own expenses
Expenses / Team Approver	Approve expenses for their team
Expenses / Administrator	Approve, post and configure expense products

An employee sees only their own expenses. Managers see their team's. Posting requires accounting rights in addition to expense rights.

8. Version differences (16 / 17 / 18)¶

Odoo 16Odoo 17Odoo 18

Not part of our Odoo 16 line — hr_expense is not a dependency of any Odoo 16 module in the NestERP stack.

attrs and states removed from views.
Pulled in by ohrms_core, hr_multi_company and thalia_mgmt_dashboard_v17.

<tree> elements superseded by <list>.
hr_expense was added to hrms_dashboard's dependencies on 18, where it was absent on 17 — so the dashboard now requires Expenses to be installed.

9. Known limitations¶

No mobile receipt scanning / OCR. Odoo's expense digitisation is Enterprise. Employees type amounts by hand.
No per-category spending limits or policy enforcement in core — nothing stops a claim exceeding a policy the client has on paper.
No mileage tracking beyond a unit-cost product.
No corporate card statement import and matching.
Approval is single-stage — the manager, then accounting. There is no multi-level chain like the one we built for purchasing.
No budget check at submission time. Overspend is visible after posting, not prevented at claim.

Needs verification on the Thalia live instance

Whether Expenses is actually used, or expenses are entered directly as vendor bills
Which expense products exist and which accounts they post to
Whether every employee has a manager set for approval
Whether the email-alias submission route is configured
Whether analytic distribution is applied to expenses
The reimbursement journal and payment method in use