Understanding Expense Items

Project expense items are accessible to users with the appropriate permission profiles. With standard permissions, Admins, Controllers and Managers can add expense items to projects for themselves or on behalf of other team members. Coordinator and Collaborators do not have access to financials and therefore have access to their own, individual expenses only and are not permitted to enter expenses on behalf of other users. Any expenses they submit will appear on the project as Not Approved until reviewed and approved by a permissioned user.

This article covers:

Billing Options
Expenses by project budget type
Expense Item fields
Related articles

Billing Options

Expense items may be defined as billable or nonbillable. A project's budget type determines which billing options are available for expense items.

Admins, Controllers and Managers can set the billing option on an expense item, while Collaborators and Coordinators cannot. By default, new expense items submitted by Collaborators or Coordinators will appear as non-billable.

Billable: Expense items marked as billable will contribute to the cost and revenue of the project. Toggling an expense as billable opens two additional fields, Markup and Unit Price, the latter being a mandatory input.
Total Price is automatically calculated based on inputs of these fields.
Non-billable: Expense items marked non-billable will contribute to costs of a project, but not revenue.

Expenses by project budget type

Non-billable projects

Non-billable projects cannot have billable expenses. All expenses on non-billable projects will be cost-only.

Fixed Price projects and Fixed Price retainers

Expenses on Fixed Price projects and Fixed Price retainers can be Billable as part of Fixed Price, Billable on top of Fixed Price or Non-billable. Admins, Controllers, Managers and users with custom permission to view financials will see the following options when submitting an expense item for these budget type projects:

Billable as part of Fixed Price - The expense will have associated revenue but will not increase the total revenue on the project. This revenue, or Total Price, is determined by the Markup or Unit Price entered for the expense.
Billable on top of Fixed Price - The expense will increase the total revenue of the project. This revenue, or Total Price, is determined by the Markup or Unit Price entered for the expense.
Non-billable - The expense will contribute to project costs, but not revenue.

Time & Materials projects and Time & Materials and Fixed Hours retainers

Expenses on T&M Projects and T&M and Fixed Hours retainers can be Billable or Non-billable. Admins, Controllers, Managers and users with custom permission to view financials can set the billing type when submitting an expense item for these budget type projects:

Billable - The expense will increase the total revenue of the project. This revenue, or Total Price, is determined by the Markup or Unit Price entered for the expense.
Non-billable - The expense will contribute to project costs, but not revenue.

Note: By default, new expense items submitted by Collaborators, Coordinators or users without permission to view financials will appear as non-billable, regardless of the project budget type.

Expense Item fields

To add a new expense item, users must complete the New Expense Item form. Learn how to create and submit your project expenses in Submitting Expenses.

The following chart details the form's fields, those that are required are noted by the * next to the field name.

Field Name	Required?	Additional Information
Expense Name	Mandatory	The name of the expense.
Date	Mandatory	Select the date when this expense took place. Any revenue or costs associated with the expense will be placed on this date. For financial data, expenses in the past are treated as Actuals whereas expenses in the future are treated as Remaining.
Category	Mandatory	Select the category for the expense. Expense categories are predefined in the company's Admin settings.
Project	Mandatory	Select the project the expense item belongs to. If the new expense item is being added from within a project's Financials, Project will reflect that project by default.
Person	Optional	Select the user for the expense. By default, the name of the person creating the expense item will appear here. For Collaborators and Coordinators, the field will not be editable. Users with appropriate permission may create a new expense item on behalf of another team member by selecting the user here.
Phase	Optional	Select a phase for the expense item. Project must be selected in order to enable Phase. The dropdown will reflect a list of the project's phases to select from.
Quantity	Mandatory	Enter the quantity of the expense.
Unit Cost	Optional	Enter the cost of the expense.
This expense is planned	Optional	Indicate whether the expense is planned or not. Only expenses marked as planned will factor into Planned Cost, Planned Revenue or Planned Profit. This option is available to Admin, Controller and Manager users only and will not appear for Coordinators or Collaborators.
This expense is approved	Optional	Indicate whether the expense is approved. Unapproved expenses will not factor into the project's budget. This option is available to Admin, Controller and Manager users only and will appear selected by default. This option will not appear for Coordinators or Collaborators. New Expense items submitted by Collaborators or Coordinators appear as Not Approved by default.

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