Best way to handle expenses and mileage

GreyAreaSecurity

Hi all,

I'm new to Wave and accounting and so far I'm really liking it, although I do think it's lacking around personal expenses and mileage tracking.

I run a small consultancy whereby I will visit a client site and in the process I will incur expenses (mileage and meals). I've only been running it for a couple of months, and what I did before I started using Wave was I paid for the fuel and meals from my personal bank account as I would do when claiming expenses for my normal day job.

I now come to the point of claiming those back from the business, and I'm not sure the best way to do it. Ideally what I would want to do it submit an expense claim each month which includes all of the above items (meals and mileage at a fixed rate per mile) and then pay this once a month back to my personal account.

I've seen the two articles on this subject - the one for creating bills for mileage and the one for adding expenses as journal transactions against owner investment/drawings. They're both a little clunky, or perhaps that's just my inexperience. I want to combine them into something where I can easily see how much I'm owed.

I was wondering if it makes more sense to just set myself (as in me personally) as a supplier, and then submit an 'invoice' to my company which is basically an expense form I create outside Wave. I can then pay this bill once per month and it keeps things neat.

Or am I missing something obvious? Is there a reason not to do this?

Thanks!

Alexia

Hi, @GreyAreaSecurity.

That would work! There are quite a few ways to handle a situation like yours and what you choose to do in the end largely depends on your preferences.

You could also create a credit card in your Chart of Accounts called "Expenses to reimburse" and use that as a payment account for mileage expenses and meals. At the end of the month, you can transfer the amount you're reimbursing to yourself from your bank account to this "credit card". It's how we recommend handling accounting for reimbursing employee expenses.

Andy_R

@Alexia Thank you for this information. Question: When you say to create a "credit card" in the Chart of Accounts (called Expenses to reimburse) do you mean to create it under the "Liabilities and Credit Cards" tab? When I go to create a bill in Wave it seems I can only assign a Payment account from the choices in Expenses and not from Liabilities. Thanks in advance.

Andy_R

UPDATE: My question above has been answered. But I still have aquestion in regards to this...
"At the end of the month, you can transfer the amount you're reimbursing to yourself from your bank account to this "credit card". "

I can physically transfer the money from my bank account but how do I record that in Wave?
Thanks in advance!

AlexL

Hey @Andy_R , glad to hear you had your first question answered. To create a transfer in Wave, follow the steps laid out in our transfers Help Center article. You'll end up with an expense representing money leaving an account, and an income representing money entering another account.

Let us know if you have any questions!