How to handle an expense overpayment and/or expense repayment?

This article will help you resolve expense overpayments to a payee. You have two options - either the payee repays the money or you make a note of it and deduct money from the payee's next expense payment.

Why do expense overpayments happen?

From time to time you may need to resolve an overpayment of expenses to a payee. This may be needed when:

• The payment amount was set up incorrectly when making payments;
• Someone accidentally made a personal purchase on the organisation's business card;
• Someone claimed for the same purchase twice;
• Someone claimed expenses for a purchase that was then refunded by the supplier.

There are two options to resolve this overpayment. Either the payee repays the money or you make a note and deduct money from the payee's next expense payment.

Payee repays the money

The payee in question manually pays the money back into your organisation's bank account.

When the 'refund' is received you can simply match the transaction through the bank matching screen.

Selecting the transaction in the left-hand table, click the + button that appears, and select the 'Expense Repayment' option from the drop down menu.

Deduct money from the payee's next expense payment

The other way to manage the expense overpayment is to deduct the amount overpaid from the person's next expense payment.

To do this, either add a negative line to the next expense claim for this person - you will need to remember to do this.

Or you can create a negative expense claim through the purchases screen for that person.

Once approved, this will wait on the payments screen until the next expense claim for that person is submitted. It will then combine and reduce the payment amount by the amount owed by the individual.

Once the payment amount is positive - as this person has claimed enough further expenses to cancel the amount of money they owe you - you can pay them the net balance owed to them, as shown on the payment screen.

To help you better understand the Purchasing module as a whole, please visit the module overview page here.