After an Expense is Signed
Once all required approval signatures are collected, the expense status changes to Signed. As treasurer or bookkeeper, you now process the payment.
Reviewing the request
- You’‘ll get an email notification with a link to the expense. You can also go to your Queue, expenses ready for processing are listed at the top.
- Review the budget details to make sure the right category is selected and the request is within budget. All requests paid and unpaid are included in the calculation for Actual so that you can choose which expenses to pay first when a budget is at risk of going over.
- Review the rest of the request for correctness. If needed, you can edit the request to correct small errors. Any change to the payee’s name or total amount being requested will reset all signatures and require a new review by everyone in the chain.
- Sign the request if everything looks good.
Marking as Paid and Recorded
- Enter the Payee details into your bill pay system. Details like name and address can be easily copied by left-clicking the text once.
- Once payment is made, and you have a check number or transaction number, enter that in the appropriate field and click, Paid.
- Enter details about this expense into your accounting system (QuickBooks, myPTEZ, etc.).
- Click Recorded
This is the final status, confirming the expense is fully processed and in your books.
Voiding and reissuing a check
If you need to re-issue a check because it was lost, went stale, or you placed a stop payment and wrote a new one for the same amount you can create an audit history.
- Open the recorded expense and click Void. This reverses the original payment in your ledger (the original entry stays for the audit trail, paired with a matching void), and returns the expense to Signed.
- Write the replacement check, then record it as a normal payment: enter the new check number and click Paid.
The voided check and its reversal cancel each other out and will not appear in reconcilations. Only the replacement check appears as outstanding until it clears the bank.
If your bank charged a stop-payment fee, record that fee as its own entry in the register. Unlike the voided check, the fee is a real debit that shows up on your statement and clears normally.
When the bank gives the money back
Online bill pay usually takes the money out of your account the day the check is sent. If the payee never cashes it, the bank credits the money back weeks or months later. By then the original payment has already appeared on a statement you reconciled, so voiding it would say the money never moved and your reconciled statement would no longer match.
Record it as a refund instead:
- Open the recorded expense. Once the payment has cleared a statement, the button reads Create refund rather than Void. If the payment hasn’t been reconciled yet you’ll still see Void, and the confirmation offers Refund instead.
- Enter the date the credit landed in your account, then save.
Both entries stay in your books and reconcile separately: the original payment on the statement where it cleared, the bank’s credit on the statement where it arrived. The expense returns to Signed so you can reissue it, and the whole story shows up under Payment history on the expense.
If the money is no longer owed (the payee moved away, or the expense was a duplicate), reject the expense instead of reissuing it. Open it and choose Reject request from the arrow beside Edit. Until you do one or the other, the budget still counts the money as committed.
If the check was written in a previous fiscal year, the refund puts the money on this year’s version of the same budget line, and lets you change it. Last year’s budget keeps exactly what it already reported, so a report you have already filed or had reviewed doesn’t change underneath you. The same applies when you reissue: the new payment lands in the year you actually paid it.
You can also start from the other end. If the credit is already sitting in your register as a deposit, open it and link it to the payment it returns. If it came in through a connected bank feed, choose Record as a refund of a payment instead of recording it as a deposit.
Filtering Expenses
You may prefer to work in batches where you do all of your approvals, then all of your payments, and so on. Use Reports → Expenses to filter expenses by status. This makes it easy to see:
- What needs to be paid (Signed status)
- What needs to be recorded (Paid status)
- What’s fully complete (Recorded status)