The short answer
Useful reimbursement preparation is more than adding numbers. Finance should be able to ask: Is this one expense or two? Who paid it? Which original document supports it? How much is being claimed? What remains unresolved? The receipt amount, actual card settlement, amount claimed and amount approved by finance are separate fields. A single spreadsheet total should not hide those differences.
Start from scattered inputs
A traveler can add paper receipts, electronic invoices, orders, card charges or a short note throughout the trip. First locate the trip's main ledger and save location. If a company reimbursement workbook already exists, continue its real columns and formulas rather than creating a second master ledger. Ask only for information needed now: perhaps the trip, traveler, reimbursement currency and whether a company policy or form exists. Collect other gaps in one list for later.
For each expense, keep the local transaction date, merchant, purpose, face amount and currency, actual paid amount and currency, payer and evidence source where available. Across time zones, the local expense date, bank posting date and entry time are not interchangeable. An unreadable receipt or conflicting amount stays open; do not infer a date or value from the destination or chat timestamp.
One expense may have several documents
A hotel receipt, a card charge and a booking record may all refer to one stay. One card statement may also include many separate expenses. Match records before posting and use a stable expense ID to connect multiple documents. Similar charges are only potential duplicates until checked; do not automatically merge or delete originals. A deposit, pre-authorization, incomplete payment or cash exchange is not automatically a new expense.
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| Situation | Record | Avoid |
|---|---|---|
| Foreign-currency receipt and home-currency card charge | Keep original amount/currency and actual bank settlement separately. If a company-approved conversion rate applies, record its source. | Presenting another transaction's rate as this transaction's actual settlement. |
| Refund or partial refund | Link it to the original expense with refund evidence, amount and date; reconcile the net. | Replacing the original receipt amount and erasing the transaction history. |
| Company, colleague or customer paid | Identify the actual payer and evidence; exclude third-party-paid amounts from the employee's personal reimbursement claim. | Treating every expense handled by the employee as personally advanced. |
| Company advance | Record the employee-managed expense and the advance, then offset at settlement. | Posting an advance as a new expense and deducting it again from each line. |
| Personal spending or no receipt | Record what occurred, classify it and flag the policy/evidence question. | Marking it reimbursable or tax-deductible without company and finance confirmation. |
What finance should receive
An expense detail lists the ID, purpose, local date, face/settlement amounts, payer and claim status. An evidence index points to the originals behind each expense. An open-item list groups missing receipts, conflicts, policy questions, refunds, allocations and approvals. The originals, ledger and index should reconcile by ID; their file counts need not be identical.
When continuing a company workbook, preserve formulas and historical approvals. Back up before changes and read the output back afterward. The skill can organize documents and check amounts supported by evidence. It cannot approve a reimbursement, make a tax determination or execute payment. Do not mark an item “approved” without approval evidence, and do not replace unknown amounts with zero.
Start using it
The Travel Expense Records and Reimbursement Preparation skill 1.0.0 is listed on WorkBuddy, and an original package is also available on the website. Select the real trip workspace, add receipts and statements as they arrive, and check the new expense IDs, saved paths and open items returned by the skill. Image/PDF reading, file writing and spreadsheet handling depend on the tools actually available to the chosen assistant. List unreadable originals rather than inventing OCR results. A cloud task workspace is not automatically the user's local folder.