Expense Receipts & Expense Reports: capture, submit, and approve expenses

Expense Receipts & Expense Reports let you capture receipts automatically, turn them into expenses, group expenses into a report, route that report for approval, and pay it out—all from one place. This article walks through the complete end-to-end flow.

There are three connected pieces. First, a receipt inbox receives receipts by email and reads them for you. Second, an approved receipt becomes an expense you can edit. Third, you can combine expenses into an Expense Report that an approver reviews and that you then reimburse.

You do not have to use every piece. Many companies start with manual expenses, add the receipt inbox later, and turn on approval only when they are ready. Each piece is described on its own below.

Who can use this?

What you can see depends on your role and how your administrator has set up your company.

Expense permission — create and manage your own expenses and Expense Reports.
Firm Admin — also sees the Expense Receipts inbox, the User Receipt Emails setup screen, and Expense Categories, and can view every user's expenses.
Workflow Approval permission — required to approve or reject an Expense Report when approval is turned on.
GL Posting permission — required to post expenses for payment.

Everything you do is always for the entity (organization) you have selected after signing in.

How the pieces fit together

The full flow has five stages:

Capture — a receipt arrives in your company's inbox (by email) or you enter an expense by hand.
Review — a Firm Admin reviews what was read from the receipt and approves it.
Expense — the approved receipt becomes an expense you can edit.
Report & approve — you group one or more expenses into an Expense Report and, if approval is set up, submit it to an approver.
Pay — after approval (or directly, if approval is not used), the report is paid out.

The rest of this article explains each stage.

Part 1 — Set up the receipt inbox

The receipt inbox gives your company a dedicated email address. Anyone can send receipt PDFs or photos to it, and Versa reads the merchant, date, amounts, taxes, currency, and line items for you.

Only a Firm Admin can set up the receipt inbox. Each user can have one receipt email address per company.

Create a receipt email address

Sign in and select your entity (organization).
Open the Expenses menu and choose User Receipt Emails.
Click New Receipt Email.
Enter a Custom Name (3–30 characters; letters, numbers, and hyphens only). The page shows the email address this will create and checks whether the name is available.
(Optional) Pick a Default Expense Category. This category is pre-selected when you approve receipts sent to this address. You can still change it during approval.
Click Create Receipt Email.

The address follows the pattern your-name-expense@app.versaclouderp.com. The custom name must be unique across all Versa companies.

Manage an existing address

From the User Receipt Emails list you can:

Edit — change the custom name or default category. Changing the custom name generates a brand-new email address; the old one stops working.
Deactivate / Reactivate — pause an inbox without deleting it. A deactivated address stops receiving receipts.
Regenerate — create a new address for the same custom name.
Delete — remove the inbox so you can create a new one. Only the owner can delete their own inbox.

What you can send to the inbox

Forward or send receipt files as attachments to the address you created. Supported file types are PDF, PNG, JPEG, JPG, and TIFF. Word, Excel, plain-text, and HEIC files are not processed.

If an email has several supported attachments, each one becomes its own receipt. If an email has no attachments, a single receipt is still created from the email itself.

Part 2 — How receipts arrive and get read

When a receipt arrives, Versa creates a receipt record and reads it in two automatic steps.

Reading (OCR) — the system reads the raw text of the receipt image or PDF.
Understanding (AI) — the read text is turned into structured fields: merchant, transaction date, currency, subtotal, tax, total, and the individual line items. The system also suggests an expense category when it can.

This usually completes within a few minutes. New receipts appear with a Pending review status while they are being processed.

Part 3 — Review and approve a receipt

A Firm Admin reviews each receipt before it becomes an expense.

The receipt inbox

Open Expenses > Expense Receipts. The list shows each receipt's Merchant, Date, Amount, Status, Confidence, and Created time, newest first. A duplicate warning icon appears when a receipt matches another receipt in your company with the same date, amount, and receipt number.

Statuses you will see:

Pending review — newly arrived or still processing.
Needs review — flagged for a closer look (for example, the amounts did not reconcile, or conversion failed).
Approved — approved and turned into an expense.
Rejected — rejected and not turned into an expense.

Click View to open a receipt. The details page shows the merchant, date, gross total, tax, currency, confidence score, receipt number (if found), and the email that sent it. If line items were read from the receipt, they appear in a Line Items table with quantity, unit price, and line total, formatted in the detected currency. A Related Document section lets you open the original attachment.

Approve a receipt

Open the receipt and review the read fields against the original attachment.
Click Approve.
In the approval window, choose the Expense Category (a suggested category is pre-selected when one is available). Add optional Notes if needed.
Confirm the approval.

An approved receipt becomes a new expense automatically. The expense uses the merchant name as its title, carries the amount and tax from the receipt, and is linked back to the receipt. The receipt status changes to Approved.

Edit before approving

For a Pending review or Needs review receipt, click Edit to correct the merchant, date, amounts, currency, category, or description before approving.

Reject a receipt

Click Reject to mark a receipt as not usable. A rejected receipt is not turned into an expense. You can still edit and approve it later if you change your mind.

Remove an approval

For an approved receipt, Remove Approval resets the receipt to Needs review. If the expense created from it has not been used elsewhere, it is removed; if it has dependencies (for example, it is already on a submitted Expense Report or a payment), it is kept but unlinked from the receipt.

Part 4 — Expenses

Whether they came from a receipt or were entered by hand, individual expenses are the building blocks of an Expense Report.

Create an expense by hand

Open Expenses > Create.
Enter a Title (required), Incurred Date, Amount, Category, and Currency.
Enter the Exch. Rate Multiplier if the expense is in a foreign currency (the default is 1.0).
Add taxes, a project, and a description as needed.
Click Create (or Save and Create New to add another).

Find your expenses

My Expenses (menu: Expenses > List Expenses for most users) shows your own expenses.
A Firm Admin sees List Expenses, which shows every user's expenses and lets you filter by user, status, category, project, and date.

Each expense has a status of its own: Created, Approved, Declined, or Paid. The Expense Report ID column shows which report, if any, an expense belongs to.

Part 5 — Expense Reports with optional approval

An Expense Report groups one or more expenses so you can submit them together. Approval is optional: it only appears when your administrator has set up an approval workflow for Expense Reports.

Is approval turned on for your company?

If Expense Reports appears in your Expenses menu, approval is set up for your entity and the workflow is enabled. If you do not see Expense Reports, your administrator has not enabled the workflow yet; in that case you work with individual expenses directly.

A Firm Admin turns the workflow on by setting up a workflow for Expense Reports (in Setup), choosing one or more approvers from users who hold the Expense permission, and giving each approver an approval limit.

Create an Expense Report

Open Expenses > List Expenses (or My Expenses).
Select the checkboxes next to the expenses you want to include. You can only select your own expenses.
Click Create Expense Report.
A report is created with a default description (for example, Expense Report 2026-08-10) and you are taken to the report's edit page.

You can also start from Expenses > Expense Reports > New to create an empty report and add expenses to it afterwards.

Work with the report

On the report page you can:

Edit the Description.
Add to Group any of your unassigned expenses listed under Available Expenses to Add.
Remove an expense from the report.
Review the totals (amount, tax, and total with tax).

Once a report is submitted or approved, you can no longer add or remove expenses from it.

Submit for approval

On the report page, click Submit for Approval.
The status changes from Pending Approval to Approval Request Sent and the report is locked. A non-admin user cannot edit a submitted report.

Approve or reject a report

The person assigned as the approver for the report's workflow stage sees the report in their approval queue. That approver must hold the Workflow Approval permission.

Open the report from the approval queue.
Choose Approved or Rejected.
Add a comment if you want to explain the decision.
Confirm. On approval, the status becomes Approved and each expense on the report is marked Approved. On rejection, the status becomes Rejected.

Approval and payment are separate. Approving a report does not pay it; it only unlocks payment.

Part 6 — Pay an approved report

After a report is Approved, the Pay Expense Report button appears on the report page.

Open the approved report.
Click Pay Expense Report.
Choose the Supplier to reimburse.
Review the bill preview (one line per expense, using each expense category's GL account).
Click Create Payment Bill.

This creates a bill in Accounts Payable. The bill starts as a draft; post and pay it through the normal bill flow, just like any other bill.

Pay expenses without a report (Post Expenses)

If your administrator has not set up Expense Reports, or you simply prefer to pay expenses one at a time, a user with GL Posting permission can pay approved expenses directly:

Open Expenses > List Expenses.
Select approved expenses that have not already been paid.
Click Post Expenses.

This creates a draft payment disbursement against your company's configured expense payout account. You will see the message Draft Payment created. Review and post. Finish posting it to complete the payment.

Related features

Expense Categories — set up in Expenses > Expense Categories (Firm Admin). Each category links to a GL account for posting and can be pre-selected for a receipt inbox.
Multi-currency expenses — enter the Exch. Rate Multiplier on a foreign-currency expense so totals convert to your company's base currency.
Approval workflow setup — Firm Admins configure approvers and approval limits under Setup workflows for Expense Reports.

Tips

Set a Default Expense Category on each receipt inbox so the most common category is pre-selected at approval time.
Use a clear, consistent Custom Name for each inbox (for example, the person's name or a team name) so receipts land in the right place.
Send only PDF or image files. Avoid HEIC, Word, and Excel—they are not processed.
Always check the Confidence score and the Line Items table on a receipt before approving, and compare against the original attachment.
If your company uses approval, make sure each submitter's preferred approver is assigned in Setup so reports route to the right person automatically.

Troubleshooting

I do not see Expense Receipts or User Receipt Emails — these menu items are only available to a Firm Admin. Ask your administrator to create the receipt inbox or give you the role.
A receipt did not appear after I emailed it — confirm you sent it to the correct address shown on the User Receipt Emails screen, that the inbox is Active, and that the file is a supported type (PDF, PNG, JPEG, JPG, TIFF). It can also take a few minutes for a new receipt to be read.
The amounts on a receipt look wrong — open the receipt, click Edit, correct the fields, and approve. The system reads most receipts accurately, but foreign number formats and handwritten receipts can need a quick check.
I do not see Expense Reports in the menu — approval is not set up for your entity. A Firm Admin needs to enable an Expense Report workflow in Setup.
Create Expense Report is disabled — you can only build a report from your own expenses, and you must select at least one. Checkboxes for other users' expenses are disabled by design.
I cannot edit a report — once a report is Approval Request Sent or Approved it is locked. Ask an approver to reject it back to you, or contact a Firm Admin if a correction is needed after approval.
Pay Expense Report does not appear — payment is only available after the report is Approved and has not already been paid. If you pay expenses individually, the GL Posting permission is required.
Post Expenses fails — every selected expense must already be Approved and not already paid. Approve the expenses first, or remove any that are already paid.

What this article does not cover

Posting and paying bills in Accounts Payable—see the bill payment guide for the AP flow.
Detailed accounting setup for expense categories, GL accounts, and tax codes—see your administrator or the accounting setup guides.
Approval workflow configuration steps for Firm Admins—covered separately in the workflow setup documentation.

Expense Receipts & Expense Reports