The week
Expenses get filed three weeks late because they are filed against a month.
A month is not a thing anybody remembers. A visit is — the customer, the day, the drive, the coffee, the parking. Claim it while standing in the car park and it is accurate; claim it on the last Friday of the month and it is archaeology.
Filing
Attached to the visit, and submitted in the same act.
A claim raised against a visit knows what it was for. It rides the same expense machinery as the rest of the business — the same categories, the same caps, the same approval — rather than being a second, lesser system for people who work outside.
Mileage is computed from the distance and your own rate for that category, shown live as it is entered, so nobody is guessing at a figure they will later be asked to justify.
- A missing receipt is refused at submission —
With the offending lines named — not accepted and then bounced back a week later by somebody in finance.
- A daily cap is a warning, not a wall —
Computed against what has already been approved that day in that category. It tells the rep before they submit rather than refusing something that may be legitimate.
- Visit expenses are forced non-billable, silently —
There is no project to bill them to, and a category with a billable default would otherwise fail on submission. So it is quietly corrected rather than becoming an error the rep cannot act on.
- A missing approver does not block the rep —
If nobody is configured to approve, the claim sits as a draft and the rep is not stopped. An administrator's unfinished setup is not the field team's problem.
Getting paid back
Two routes, chosen from whether the person is on payroll.
Somebody with an employee record is reimbursed through payroll. Somebody who exists only in the CRM — a contractor, an agency rep, a partner — goes to a manual queue where an administrator records the payment with a reference.
The route is decided automatically and the wrong one is refused by name rather than half-working. The queue shows who to pay and how to reach them, so nobody has to look a person up to pay them.
- Photograph a receipt with the rear camera —
Straight from the phone, with a progress bar per file, on a connection that may not be good.
- A rep sees their own claims and what happened to them —
Status, route, amount, filed date, and the payment reference once it is paid.
›Where does approval happen?
Through the shared expense queue rather than inside this module — the same place project and travel expenses are approved, which is deliberate: one queue, one policy.
›Can a visit draft an expense automatically?
There is a setting for it in the preferences and it does nothing today. Treat it as absent and file claims deliberately.
›Does logging a visit record time?
Optionally, as a timesheet draft — from the check-in and check-out where both exist, and from a default duration where they do not.