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Expense Handling
Hello,
We currently use Harvast’s expense tracking for all our expenses, that is client and internal expenses.
Some of these expenses are billable, and some are not. The ones that are not, usually go under the “company” account. Also, some expenses are paid by the company (i.e., by a consultant but on a company card), and others by the consultant directly. This makes it difficult to figure out what to actually reimburse the consultant on.
What would be very useful is the following:
1. Ability to mark an expense as billable or non-billable, against a client account. We could then track real expenses to a client, even if not all of them get billed back to them.
2. Ability to mark an expense as reimbursable. This would allow us to quickly report on what needs to be reimbursed to the consultant, and what has already been paid by the company.
Any chance these could be implemented?
I’d love this too.
I work around it at the moment using a custom category (“Billable to client”) and a little hastag in the description “#consultant” or “#company” which I split in excel using text-to-columns splitting on # as a delimiter.
Be great if you integrated fully though.
Agreed! A much needed feature for me.
I work around it by sending non-billable expenses to a separate company wide project called “non-billable” and then I make a note about what it was for but it does make tracking total project costs (billable or not) difficult. It would be nice to track against the project for a better understanding of how profitable the project really was thereby making us better informed on how to estimate and charge on proejcts in the future.
I’m in with this request big time— Would be a huge help for me, especially if non-reimbursable and reimbursable expenses can both be viewed in reports per-project, as well as general non-reimbursable internal expenses. I’d be okay with tracking internal expenses as a project for now, but the non-reimbursable vs. reimbursable for clients’ projects would be helpful. This would be a major factor in keeping me from having to create a separate local tracking solution… Thanks for considering, guys!
My company is also in desperate need of this feature. It is actually the one big thing that is keeping us from moving our expense tracking over to Harvest (we are still using an excel system).
How soon might we see movement on this?
@robertcole Your urgency is noted, and we’re sorry for any inconvenience. Unfortunately, we do not release timelines for feature releases.
While you’re at it, can you add multiple currency support to expenses. This is a critical feature for any non-US business, and right now is making us look at alternatives to Harvest, even though we love it for time tracking and invoicing.
Thanks for your input, Robert. We’re certainly aware that the expense section could be better for non-US businesses, so consider it noted as we continue to improve things here.
+1 This feature would allow us to track expenses in Harvest along with our time which we would really like to do. The one clarification for us being that non-billable expenses not show up on invoices.
+1. In addition, along the same lines, as an employee I sometimes need to record expenses and lodge an expense claim that I myself need to be reimbursed for. I would like harvest to take care of this.
I would love to be able to lodge them from harvest much like I already can, but also and have my company accounts person ( perhaps another role required ) receive the expense claim (which as been approved by my manager) , pay me back, and also flag when I have been reimbursed.
This way I can check my claims in a report and see which ones I have been compensated for.
+1 for this last suggestion about internal expenses handling and reimbursements. This would be tremendously helpful!
This feature is critical for more professional service orgs. I love your app and this would really make it competitive with the alternatives out there. Please add me to this list!
I was wondering if there were any updates on this potential feature. We are running into this problem on a regular basis and it would be huge to us to see it added sooner than later. Presently we need to expand out our expense types from 10 to 40 (One for each combo of billable/non-billable and reimbursable/non-reimbursable) to work around this issue.
Hi @gpb, it’s not being actively developed at this time (but is near the top of our todo list), so I can’t really give you any information on timelines. I was going to suggest the work-around of using expense categories, but it sounds like you’re already doing that.
+1 to this.
Our variables:
- Employee can pay with own credit card or company credit card (ie: reimbursable or non-reimbursable)
- Expense can be billable to a client or not
We just want a way to track whether we still need to reimburse an employee for an expense or not.
This is the only part of using Harvest we’re anxious about… everything else inspires confidence!
I use freelancers for almost all projects so tracking expenses (billable to client) and expenses (that are internal) is most of what I do. It would be truly helpful to have a feature that lets me choose what type of expense I am entering. AND to be able to enter expenses into the project directly, instead of through the timesheet. Our freelancers work on a “project Fee” basis so assigning these expenses to particular days/hours is misleading. Improving this feature would make Harvest 200% more usable to me.
Tracking expenses is the one thing I’m really missing in Harvest.
It would be great to track all expenses and get an overview about profit, internal cost and costs within a project.
Nowadays we have no clue except for our bank-balance, and every Quarter the numbers throughout the accountant. I tried connecting up with Outright, but this just doesn’t work. There are competitors that can read out your banks’ csv’s as well. Also you have your recurring costs (hosting, rent, isp, phone etc)…
It would be great to have a feature which makes it possible to have a sustainable view about how your company is doing at all time.
+1 for us. Cheers.
I’ll add one more component to this that would be a huge benefit to us – just came up today. Sometimes we need to enter expenses for a week in time well after that week has already been invoiced to a client. It would be very useful to be able to enter historical expenses after something has been invoiced and then just have them show up on the next invoice to that customer. Currently once a week has been invoiced and paid, its locked and you can not modify it. Our only solution is to now fill out those expenses in our old excel expense report (sad) and send them off to the customer manually.
I note this has been outstanding since 2009. The features implemented since then must have been really popular.
I would really like to see this implemented. Right now I just log non-billable expenses to Internal, but that’s not very helpful for reporting.
It would also be helpful if you could set a separate Fee and Expense budget when creating projects so that team members TIME is tracked against the Fee Budget…and all billable Expenses are tracked against the Expense budget.
+1. Since the company is growing, we need to start tracking project profitability and it is impossible without the ability to designate project expenses to project budgets. I like the design and simplicity of Harvest but time tracking ability does not cover our software needs. Please put this issue on “critical” list (as Dominic noted, users have giving you feedback on this issue since 2009) or we have to migrate to other software.
Hey, thanks for the feedback, guys. We’ll keep you in the loop if we have anything to announce about this!
I would be really happy if we could simply attribute expenses to specific invoices after the fact.
For example – We are a graphic design and print broker. We design our client’s business cards, then invoice them on delivery – we don’t get invoiced from our printer however until after I’ve invoiced our client.
It would be great even, after sending out the invoice I could assign the expense.
@discotoast Good idea!
Currently Harvest is designed to record expenses that you would like to directly bill to a client. It’s not really designed to record cost-of-goods expenses. That would be more of an accounting thing rather than invoicing.
Just to reiterate our conundrum: Sometimes an employee does a “house call” and pays for parking out of his/her pocket. The employer now has two tasks: bill the expense through to the client, and ensure the employee gets reimbursed.
Harvest works great for the former, not so great for the latter.
