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What is an Expense?

An expense in Smartbills represents a business-related purchase or cost that needs to be tracked, categorized, and potentially reimbursed. Every expense starts with a receipt or transaction record and flows through a structured lifecycle until it is accounted for. Smartbills provides two distinct inboxes for managing expenses depending on who owns them: the Expenses and the Business Expenses.

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Expenses vs. Business Expenses

Smartbills separates expenses into two workspaces to match how organizations actually handle spending.

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Expenses

The Expenses is where individual employees manage their own out-of-pocket expenses. When an employee pays for a business meal, a taxi, or office supplies with their own money, the receipt lands in their Expenses list. From there, the employee categorizes the expense, attaches it to an expense report, and submits it for reimbursement.
  • Each employee has their own private Expenses list
  • Only the employee, and administrators, can see its contents
  • Expenses here are typically submitted via expense reports for reimbursement
  • Requires that access permission to access

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Business Expenses

The Business Expenses is a shared workspace where business expenses that belong to the organization are collected and reviewed. These might include corporate credit card charges, vendor invoices forwarded by email, or any expense that does not require employee reimbursement.
  • Shared across team members with the appropriate permissions
  • Managed by finance teams, managers, or accountants
  • Expenses flow in from email forwarding, integrations, and manual entry
  • Requires that access or that access permission

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How It Works

1

Capture

An expense enters Smartbills through one of several methods: uploading a receipt image, forwarding an email, scanning with the mobile app, manual entry, or the Outlook add-in. See Receipt Forwarding for details on each method.
2

Process (OCR)

Smartbills uses optical character recognition (OCR) to automatically extract key data from receipt images: vendor name, date, total amount, taxes, currency, and line items. The extracted data is pre-filled into the expense form for the user to review.
3

Categorize

The expense is assigned a category (such as Travel, Meals, or Office Supplies) and optionally a department. Smartbills may suggest a category based on the vendor or past behavior. See Categories and Departments.
4

Review

The employee or manager reviews the extracted data, corrects any errors, adds notes, and confirms the expense is ready. Required fields such as business purpose or project code may need to be filled in depending on company policy.
5

Report

For Expenses expenses, the employee adds the expense to an expense report and submits it for approval. Business Expenses expenses may be processed directly without a report depending on the organization’s workflow. See Expense Reports.

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Ways to Add an Expense

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Expense Statuses

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Key Terminology

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Roles Involved

Receipt Forwarding

Learn about all the ways to get receipts into Smartbills

Expense Reports

Group expenses into reports for approval and reimbursement

Categories and Departments

Organize expenses by type and business unit

Upload an Expense

Step-by-step guide to uploading your first expense