Expenses paid personally or in cash

Sooner or later a company cost gets paid the wrong way round: the domain renewal goes on your personal card, or a taxi is paid in cash. The cost is the company's, and until it pays you back, the company owes you the money.

Arvello has no separate owner-reimbursement or petty-cash feature. What it does have is enough for the usual case — a purchase you paid personally and the company pays you back by bank transfer. This page shows how that works and where the limits are.

Recording the expense

Record the purchase like any other bill, under Expenses with New Expense — see Purchase invoices:

• Supplier — the shop or service you bought from, not yourself. The expense is the company's purchase from them.
• Lines, category and tax code — as on the receipt. The tax code decides whether any input VAT is deducted, exactly as for a bill the company paid itself.
• Due Date — the field's hint says to leave it blank if the bill is already paid. Arvello then uses the invoice date as the due date. The expense still counts as Unpaid once finalised, because no payment has gone out of the company's accounts yet.
• The receipt — attach the photo or PDF to the expense.

If you forward the receipt email to the company's receipt address (see Receipts & documents), Arvello looks for the matching payment in the company's bank transactions. A purchase made on your personal card isn't there, so the receipt usually waits as Needs review. Open it and use Link to invoice to attach it to the expense you recorded.

Paying yourself back

Transfer the money from the company account to your own. When the transfer shows up in the company's bank feed, reconcile it under Banking → Needs Attention:

Director Withdrawal is a different thing: it books money paid out to a director to the director's loan account (1520), as money the director owes the company. A reimbursement booked that way would leave the expense unpaid and show you owing the company the same amount.

Two other kinds of personal spending have their own routes:

• Home office running costs go through a home office agreement and monthly claims, and the reimbursement is reconciled as Home Office Reimbursement.
• Business trips. The business trip payment you reconcile covers the daily allowance only. Transport, accommodation and other costs added to the trip are kept with it, receipts included, but they don't reach the books from there. Record them as expenses too.

What Arvello can't do yet

• Pay an expense in cash. Expenses are marked paid only by reconciling a bank transaction. Sales invoices have Record payment with a Cash / undeposited funds option, but expenses have nothing similar. An expense paid from the company's cash, rather than a bank account, stays Unpaid.
• Settle the debt any other way. If the company never pays you back — say you'd rather leave the money in the company — Arvello can't turn the debt into a loan or a capital contribution. It has no manual journal entries, so the expense stays Unpaid, in the Unpaid Expenses card on the Expenses dashboard and in the What You Owe report, under the shop's name.
• Track what the company owes you as a person. The amount sits in accounts payable against each supplier, not in an account of its own for you.

Keeping the receipt

A receipt is the source document (algdokument) behind the entry. Under the Accounting Act it has to show at least the date, what the transaction was, and the figures, such as quantity, price and amount (RPS § 7 lg 2). An invoice between two accounting entities also needs an invoice number and details identifying both parties (lg 3). Source documents are kept for seven years from the end of the financial year in which the entry was made (RPS § 12 lg 1).

Official text: Accounting Act.