Advanced: Expenses & Vendor Bills

For users who already know the basics — this guide covers AI vendor matching from the inbox, the 185 default expense categories and how customisation works, auto-approval thresholds, batch payment workflows, VAT splitting on expenses, and billable vs. non-billable routing.

AI Vendor Matching from the Inbox

When a document arrives in the inbox (via email forward or manual upload), the AI extraction pipeline runs two operations in sequence:

1. Extraction — the AI reads the PDF or image and extracts: vendor name, IBAN, postal address, VAT number, total amount, due date, and line items.
2. Vendor matching — the system tries to match the extracted data to an existing vendor using this priority order:
   • IBAN exact match — if the extracted IBAN matches an existing vendor's IBAN exactly, it's a confident match.
   • Fuzzy name match — if no IBAN match, the system compares the extracted vendor name against existing vendor names using fuzzy string matching.
   • Auto-create — if no match above a confidence threshold, a new vendor is created automatically from the extracted data.

Review auto-created vendors carefully. The AI will create duplicates if the name differs slightly (e.g., "Swisscom AG" vs. "Swisscom Schweiz AG"). After classifying a batch of new invoices, check Vendors → All for near-duplicates and merge them. There's no auto-merge feature — you'll need to consolidate manually and re-link any payables that went to the duplicate.

Pre-loading vendors before your first inbox batch dramatically reduces duplicates. Enter your top 20 vendors — especially utilities, rent, and recurring suppliers — with their IBAN before you start forwarding invoices.

The 185 Default Expense Categories

The system ships with 185 Swiss-standard expense categories covering everything from Geschäftsreisen to EDV-Kosten. These are shared defaults managed at the platform level.

Copy-on-Write Customisation

You cannot edit the platform defaults directly. When you customise a category in Organization → Expense Categories, the system creates a tenant-scoped override of that category. The global default stays untouched for other tenants.

What you can customise per category:

• Requires receipt — toggle whether a receipt upload is mandatory.
• Requires approval — toggle whether the manager approval step is enforced (independent of auto-approval thresholds).
• Max amount — the ceiling above which the expense is always routed to approval regardless of the employee's auto-approval limit.
• Monthly / yearly limit per employee — when exceeded, approval is required even if the individual expense is below the threshold.
• VAT rate — the default rate for expenses in this category (used for the automatic net/tax split).
• Payroll wage type — maps to a specific payroll line when the expense flows to reimbursement.

Categories you've never touched continue to use the platform default. Resetting a category to its default (if you've customised it) requires deleting the tenant override via Organization → Expense Categories → {category} → Reset to default.

Auto-Approval Thresholds

Auto-approval removes the manager bottleneck for routine, low-value expenses. It works at two levels:

Employee-Level Limits

Each employee has a monthly expense limit and a yearly expense limit. If a submitted expense would keep the employee within both limits, and the category doesn't have a lower maximum or the Requires approval flag set, the expense is auto-approved.

The system checks the running total for the current month and year against these limits — it's not per-submission, it's cumulative. An employee who submits five small expenses that together exceed the monthly limit will have the expense that crosses the threshold routed to approval, and all subsequent ones that month.

Category-Level Override

If a category has Requires approval toggled on, or a Max amount set lower than the employee's limit, the category rule takes precedence. An employee with a CHF 200/month limit who submits a CHF 50 entertainment expense will still go to approval if the Entertainment category has Requires approval = true.

Configuring for your organisation: A common setup is to auto-approve under CHF 100 for standard categories (transport, meals, small supplies) and always require approval for categories like gifts, entertainment, and hardware.

Batch Payment Workflows

The To-Pay queue is designed for processing multiple payables at once. The standard batch workflow:

1. Open Ausgaben → To-Pay.
2. Sort by due date (the default) to prioritise what needs to be paid first.
3. Use the checkboxes to select all payables you're paying today — typically a week's worth.
4. Click Batch mark paid → confirm the payment date (defaults to today).

All selected payables are marked paid simultaneously and move to the Archive.

When payment dates differ: If some payments went out on Monday and some on Wednesday, run two separate batch operations with the correct date for each group rather than one batch with today's date.

Bank reconciliation note: The system records a payment date but does not connect to your bank. Reconciliation between the system and your actual bank statement is a manual step. Export the paid payables list (Archive → Export) to compare against your bank transactions. The Finanzexporte dashboard (Phase 2) will eventually support direct reconciliation.

VAT Splitting on Expenses

Expenses are entered as gross amounts (VAT-inclusive). The system automatically splits this into net + tax based on the category's configured VAT rate.

The split is calculated at submission time and frozen. If you change the category's VAT rate later, existing expenses are not recalculated. This is intentional for audit integrity.

Mixed-VAT receipts: If a single receipt contains items at different VAT rates (e.g., a restaurant bill with food at 2.5% and alcohol at 8.1%), the current system cannot split one receipt into multiple tax buckets. The workaround is to enter two separate expenses for the same receipt — one for each VAT rate — and upload the same receipt PDF to both. Flag this in the notes for the bookkeeper.

Billable vs. Non-Billable Routing

Every expense submitted by an employee is one of three types, selected at submission time:

Billable expenses require a project. When an employee selects Bill to client, they must also pick a project (which has a linked client). The expense appears in the Add unbilled expenses tab on that client's invoices, scoped to the project.

If an employee submits a billable expense without a project, or picks the wrong project, correct it before approval — once it's approved and linked to an invoice it cannot be re-routed.

Vendor payables are never billable. Bills from vendors in the To-Pay queue are outgoing payments to suppliers. They do not flow into client invoices. Only employee Spesen with the Bill to client flag are billable.

Related Guides

• Modules-Spesenverwaltung — basic setup and daily workflow
• Advanced: Rechnungsstellung — importing billable expenses into invoices