Expenses

Expenses in the sidebar is where you claim money back — a taxi to a client, a conference ticket, a software subscription you paid for personally. You submit, your manager approves, finance pays. Everyone has this page; what you see on it depends on your role.

Submitting one

New expense needs three things: what it was for, how much, and when you incurred it (today by default). Everything else helps whoever approves and books it:

• Category — travel, meals, accommodation, software, office supplies, professional services, mileage, conference, client entertainment, or other.
• Currency — defaults to USD, change it if you paid in something else. The amount is not converted for you; it's recorded as spent.
• Project and Entity — which work, and which legal entity, the cost belongs to. Both show on the claim so your approver and finance can see what they're paying for without asking. Note that a claim tagged to a project does not flow into that project's profitability figures — those are built from tracked hours and invoices, not expenses.
• Receipt — a photo or PDF. Optional, but almost always what your approver asks for next if it's missing.

Attach the receipt first. OtiumWork reads it with AI and pre-fills the amount, currency, date, merchant and category for you, so most claims become a glance-and-submit. It only fills fields you haven't typed in yet, so it can't overwrite your own wording. If the scan can't make sense of the image, nothing breaks — you'll see a note saying so and you fill it in yourself. Either way, check the numbers before submitting: what's on the receipt and what you're claiming are your responsibility, not the scanner's.

Once you submit, your manager is notified automatically. You don't need to chase anyone or send a separate message.

What happens next

Status	Meaning
submitted	Waiting on your manager.
pending_admin	Your manager approved, but the amount is over your company's threshold, so it also needs executive sign-off.
approved	Cleared for payment; sitting in finance's payable queue.
rejected	Turned down — the reason your approver typed is shown on the expense.
paid	Money sent. You're notified, and the payment method and reference are recorded.

The threshold that triggers the extra sign-off is set per company by an admin, so a $40 taxi and a $4,000 flight can follow different paths without you having to know which is which.

Fixing or withdrawing a claim

You can delete your own expense while it's still submitted or after it's been rejected — so a claim sent in error, or one you need to resubmit properly, is yours to clean up. Once it's approved or paid it stays on the record.

If a rejection was a misunderstanding, submit a corrected claim rather than arguing on the old one; the reason text stays attached to the original for the audit trail.

Claiming for someone else

Finance and admins can submit an expense on behalf of another employee — useful when someone's out, or when a shared card payment needs to sit against the right person. Everyone else can only submit for themselves.

For approvers and finance

The approval side — the queue, the two-step escalation, and where the threshold is configured — is covered in Team and approvals. Finance's payable and paid views live on the same Expenses page, visible to anyone with finance access.

Related

• Team and approvals — the manager's side of this flow.