Payhawk provides powerful options for monitoring and reporting on your company expenses and seamlessly utilizes its optical character recognition (OCR) functionality to extract expense information from attached receipt notes and invoices automatically.
Every employee at your company can create and submit expenses in Payhawk.
Only Payhawk administrators can define the settings for the expense types at your company and the workflows for approving expense requests and payments.
Types of expenses in Payhawk
Employees at your company can create the following types of expenses:
Card expenses
Bill payments
Company cash
Reimbursement
Mileage
Per diem
Lifecycle of expenses
The following table lists the available tabs under which an expense is positioned depending on its status and based on the approval workflows required by the organization.
Tab | Status details |
Submit | The Expenses > Submit tab contains expenses that have the Submit option for the expense type in Workflows switched on and have not been submitted yet. These expenses await employees (or the authorized people on their behalf) to explicitly confirm the expense submission one by one or in bulk by clicking on the Submit button. If the Submit option for all expense types in Workflows is switched off, the Submit tab will be automatically hidden. From here, the authorized people or roles at the company can also: Once submitted, the expense will automatically:
|
Approve | The Expenses > Approve tab contains all expenses that have the Submit option of the expense type in Workflows switched on and are pending approval.
From here, the authorized people or roles at the company can also: Once an expense is approved, it will automatically move under the Review tab. |
Review | The Expenses > Review tab contains all expenses that are ready for review. These include the expenses that do not require the submission and, therefore, the approval step when they are created. From here, the authorized people or roles at the company can also: Once the expense has been reviewed, it automatically moves under the Pay tab. In case of a card expense, it will directly move under All. |
Pay > Confirm details | The expenses under the Expenses > Pay > Confirm details tab require confirmation of their payment details before the payment is initiated. From here, the authorized people at your company can: Once done, click on Confirm details and the expense will move under the Pay > Authorize tab. |
Pay > Authorize | The expenses under the Expenses > Pay > Authorize tab are all that require authorization for their immediate or scheduled payment. From here, the authorized people at your company can: |
Pay > Scheduled | The Scheduled tab contains all bills that have been scheduled for a specific date or their due date. From here, the authorized people at your company can: |
All | The Expenses > All tab contains all expenses regardless of their above-mentioned statuses. From here, for paid expenses, the authorized people at your company can: |
Automatic data extraction with OCR
As part of its expense management solution, Payhawk has developed a native OCR tool, which automatically extracts the relevant information from uploaded invoices and receipt notes, and transfers it to the Payhawk system.
For more information about which expense data is read and automatically populated by the OCR tool, see the article on the automatic population of expense field data in Payhawk.
Checking for duplicate expenses
Payhawk automatically detects duplicate expenses. For example, if an employee submits the same invoice twice—once for a Payhawk card transaction and again as a reimbursement request—the system will flag it.
Duplicate checks are based on all of the following criteria:
Amount
Supplier
Document date
Document number
If a duplicate is found, the system will allow the submission but will display a warning for the reviewer during the review step.
If the submitter edits any of the checked fields, the reviewer will be notified, provided the warning in the review assistant is enabled.
Icons and navigation
For faster and more intuitive navigation, the current state of an expense in Payhawk is indicated with an icon and can be any of the listed in the following table.
Icon | Indication | Details |
| The expense is missing a document. | Often, expenses without uploaded documents are card payments waiting for the cardholder to add a receipt note or an invoice. |
| The expense has an attached document or is reviewed. |
|
| The expense is archived. | Archived expenses are read-only and cannot be edited. However, they can be viewed and exported, their payment documents downloaded and their history traced. |
Color codes
You can have a quick overview of the expense status based on the following color codes the system utilizes:
Red - Overdue payments. The due date on the attached expense document is past.
Orange - Due payments. The due date on the attached expense document shows the payment is expected at or planned for a specific date.
Black - Paid expenses.
