I have one issue which i am trying to find the best solution and not a work around.
I have expense claims filled by the employees. I ask them to issue the claim and also attach the receipts/invoices. Sometimes, apart from all the receipts, there are specific invoices which i would like to enter to Erpnext as purchase invoice due to some reasons. I need to track these invoices in future, so i need them to have an invoice number in Erpnext, such as PINV-xxxx. In this case, i have expense claim on one hand and purchase invoice on the other hand both waiting to be paid both having the same item.
I was looking for a way to tell Erpnext that the purchase invoice is paid by employee (maybe by linking it to the expense claim). Does anybody have any solution?
I thought about seperating the invoice from the expense claim and consider them as two separate actions. But this case the company pays the money to the supplier not to the employee.
One other option is directly checking the is paid checkbox while entering the purchase invoice. But again, i need to enter payment method which can not be linked to the expense done by the employee.
To sum up, i would like to have the purchase invoice, to be scanned, uploaded and to have a document number in Erpnext but also would like to pay the employee the expense he/she made. I am not account specialist so any idea would be important. Any ideas?
You can link your Expense Claim DocType to your Purchase Invoice. In this way, you will create two documents but you can link the two. To do that, you must add a custom field. Please refer following screenshot to do so.
@shachiTakalkar thanks for the suggestion. I’ve implemented the link to expense claim to purchase invoice.
I have created a custom liability account to book the expenses of the employees who paid the invoices. But is there a better way to control which employee paid how much? A quick way to check how much money do i owe to which employee? Maybe something like checking the balances of the suppliers?
I have checked the earlier discussions but could not find a proper solution/suggestion.
One suggestion could be telling Erpnext that a specific employee paid the invoice directly on the payment method section. I don’t know if this has already been discussed or not.
Hi @SecA , I have the same problem that you mentioned at the beginning, but I don’t understand how you solve the problem of not having two cash outlets. Since both the purchase invoice and expense claim would double the output so that both are paid?
First of all, i had no finance or accounting experience before. I have found a solution which actually worked for me.
But after having some discussions with our accountant and a CFO of an international company, i don’t use the solution anymore.
What i did was to create a new payment method for the company. Instead of paying via wire transfer or credit card or cash, company paid the invoice via this new method (let’s name it employee) and linked purchase invoice to expense claim as shown above. But this method needs a new liability account in the middle. This means the new liability account is booked against let’s say “travel expenses”. Imagine you don’t pay the invoice with the money you have but you borrow money from another account (in this case employee’s account). Afterwards the bank needs to be booked to pay the debt on the liability account. I think this process made things complicated.
What i do on Erpnext is not directly using what the system offers us.
Employees fill the expense claims and send to approval.
Approved claim needs to be signed by both claimer and approver (wet-signature is important as we are discussing financials)
Then, the accounting issues the invoices in a normal way.
The payment entry has the information of the bank transfer to the employee who actually paid the invoice (with the signed expense form and the invoice attached) - or just cash.
To sum up, the expense claim form on Erpnext is just a way to ask people to fill a form. When you want to create a payment entry via expense claim, things get complicated.
If you don’t want to see “unpaid” remark on expsene claims, the process can be managed with an excel sheet or however you want.
I realised that even i want things to be more easily managed, they get complicated.
Maybe there will be an update to this issue and Erpnext can handle the issue at background to prevent the double output you mentioned.
We should make an issue to see if you can integrate into erpnext any workflow that contemplates that all expenses come from a purchase invoice that the company has to load.
I have a similar experience.
In my case, Employee applied for Expense claim. Then it was approved. When we wanted to make payment, we changed the Party from the employee to the Supplier because the payment was transferred from the bank to the supplier.
At the end, the Expense Claim remains unpaid.
And there is no option to delete the claim, so that we now submit a purchase invoice against the supplier
I don’t know how other erp systems work about this specific issue.
I guess one solution could be, being able to create purchase invoices directly in expense claim module.
This way accounting can create already paid purchase invoices by approved expense claims.
I don’t know if this is ok or not. Any comments are appreciated.
There are expense claims created by employees who pay for things with their personal credit card, and those expenses are signifiant enough to warrant a purchase invoice (e.g., our operations person pays on their personal card all of our sales team’s cellular bills).
I like the workaround solution you provided SecA.
It would be wonderful to be able to relate specific expense claim items to a purchase invoice. Even if it’s not on the roadmap, I still have nothing but thanks and praise for the ERPNext team for this wonderful product.
I am tagging you because you were the one who was involved in this topic.
Even though we have closed the issue, it is not solved actually.
Is there any accountant specialist who can answer the questions here? Or anyone in Erpnext team who can offer a solution?
@Nate_Riches has mentioned that such a solution is not in the roadmap but what i would like to know the “normal” process. Are we discussing something out of ordinary or a regular process which will eventually be included in Erpnext sometime?
I am asking this because sometimes we feel like a feature should be included but it could not be a general thing for everyone to use.
