How to organize reimbursable expenses

Google Sheets
1

Hi all,

First of all, thank you for your time reading this.

I have two situations regarding reimbursable expenses.

I have expenses that are reimbursable from my company. the cost exits my checking account and then an income will be back.

My wife sometimes receives an income from company to pay the expenses for the company and also it is an income for hers checking account.

How can I separate it from our personal expenses in both situation.

I think I’m doing to many transactions in and out just to try to cover this and put them out of our budget since its not our expenses.

Best Regards,

2

I have a Reimbursable Category that I have setup to hide from Reports. If you wanted more granularity, you could add Tags for each Business Trip, Activity, or Event.

Every so often I run a manual Category Report for the Reimbursable category to make sure it’s zero. If you’re using Tags, I’d use the Tags report.

Some people use a separate Reimbursed Category to track payments, but I prefer seeing my Category go to Zero.

You could also use a Pivot table. Here’s a recent thread about Pivot Tables, although with a slightly different use case.

3

So basically you have like, for example:

parking
food
expenses

all in reimbursable category as transfer?

and the same in reimburse category to in and out, or you use the same category to classify the transfer out and then the transfer in when the company pays it?

And for other example. My health insurance only reiburses a part of my expense. How to track that? expense/income?

can you give me an example if is not too much to ask :smiley:

Best regards,

4

you could set as either transfer or expense, because the assumption is that the in and out flows will net out when reimbursed, it should be zero and thus not matter overall. (but otherwise yes same category as in and out ie you paid $10 for reimbursee (parking), and then credited -$10 for reimbursee (parking).

in your insurance sample you would have it set as expense so the difference falls to expense.
But in this situation you’ll either embed the reimbursables into the your normal categories or you’ll need new reimbursable categories.

So initial question is do you want new categories, 1 lumpsum category, or have reimbursables category, we’ll need more examples of what situations you experiences to offer better examples.

5

I, too, use a “Reimbursement” category. I actually call it “Return/Reimbursement” because I use it when I buy and then return something to the store… I also added a “Matching” column in my transactions sheet. It might be overkill, but it helps me make sure all my “Reimbursements” net out to zero. It also acts as a reminder of something I need to return. If something is to be reimbursed, I set the category to “Return/Reimbursement”. When the reimbursement comes in, I place the date that the reimbursement came in on in the “Matching Column” in YYYY-MM-DD format on both transactions. That way, I can filter on “Return/Reimbursement” and sort by the Matching Column to see what records don’t net out to zero.