Track rebillable expenses

A flight, a contractor invoice, a licence bought for one engagement. Each one changes what a project made, and the only thing deciding which way is whether the client pays it back.

Expenses live on the project under Finance, next to the margin figures they feed.

File an expense

Steps

1. Open the project, go to the Finance tab, and in the Expenses panel click New expense.
2. Fill in What was it for, the Amount, and the Category (Travel, Accommodation, Meals, Equipment, Software, Subcontractor, or Other).
3. Set the currency to the one the money actually left your account in. It defaults to the project’s.
4. Decide Rebill this to the client, on by default.
5. Click Add expense. It saves as a Draft.

Note

The exchange rate is recorded when you file, not when somebody reads the report months later, so a rate that moves next quarter cannot rewrite what this cost you.

Rebillable or absorbed

Setting	Meaning	Effect on margin
Rebillable (default)	The client pays it back	Nets to zero: cost and revenue both rise by the amount.
Absorbed	Your firm swallows it	Reduces margin by the full amount.

Rebillable nets to zero rather than adding revenue because passing a £400 flight on at cost earns you nothing. Counted as revenue with no matching cost, every rebilled expense would look like profit, and a month of heavy travel would read as your best month.

There is no markup option. An expense is passed through at cost or absorbed in full.

Caution

Rebillable is not the same as the project being billable. A billable project can still carry costs you eat. If a rebillable expense sits on a non-billable project, the project wins and it counts as absorbed.

Approval

State	Meaning
Draft	Yours. Nobody else sees it.
Submitted	Waiting on an approver.
Approved	Counted. The only state that reaches the margin report.
Returned	Sent back with a reason shown on the row. Fix it and submit again.

Submit your own Draft with Submit for approval, or pull it back with Withdraw while it is still Submitted. An approver clicks Approve on somebody else’s claim.

Who can approve is the same rule as timesheets: your nominated approvers if the workspace names any, otherwise Owners, Admins and Portfolio Managers. You can never approve your own claim even as an approver, and the button never appears on your own rows.

Caution

Approved is final. There is no un-approve, because reversing one would move a margin figure somebody has already reported. Correct a wrong claim with an offsetting entry.

Deleting a claim

You can delete a claim only while it is your own Draft. After that it is in somebody else’s queue.

Caution

A deleted expense does not go to the recycle bin. Expenses are the one record in Onplana that departs from the recover-it-later default. Withdraw rather than delete if you might want it back.

Reading the totals

The header shows Approved cost, Rebillable (how much of it you expect back), and a count awaiting approval. Both figures are per currency and never added together, because one blended number would move with the exchange rate rather than with your spending.

A cost you know about but cannot find in the margin report is almost always sitting in Submitted, not lost.