Employees are often given different fringe benefits, as a part of their overall package, by their employers. To avail some of these benefits, such as medical bills, the employees have to pay out of their pocket first, and then claim the money, or seek reimbursement from their employers. In addition to the benefits, there are many operational and day-to-day work-related expenses, such as traveling for meetings, that employees may have to pay for, but later on, can claim for.
To ease this task, and bring uniformity in the claim process, the employers develop an expense claim worksheet, also referred to as expense reimbursement form, to be filled by the employees, when they are requesting the reimbursement.
What is an expense claim worksheet?
An expense claim worksheet is a spreadsheet that is provided by an employer to his employees to be filled for reimbursement purposes. When an employee pays for an expense, and he is entitled to receive the money-back from the company, he would fill this sheet to make a request to the employer for reimbursing his money. In this sheet, he provides all the relevant details of the incurred expense, including the purpose and payment amount. In short, the employee claims his money and seeks reimbursement through this sheet.
What are the advantages of an expense claim worksheet?
The expense claim worksheet has many benefits linked to it, which include:
- Uniformity of the claim process.
As the company provides a similar worksheet to all the employees, it would be easy to analyze and process the claim requests, if all the employees have followed the same pattern.
- Any discrepancy from the entitled amount can be highlighted.
If an employee is trying to claim more money than he is allowed to, the employer can clearly see that and can investigate, and address the issue.
- Less chances of a fraud.
As all the information needs to be provided, with the evidence, the probability of the employee seeking reimbursement for the expenses, that he has not even incurred, becomes minimal.
- Limits delays of operational work.
If the employee is certain, that he will get reimbursed, he would not hesitate to pay from his own money for the necessary operational expenses, which would have caused delays and impacted work, if the employee would not have paid for them immediately.
What are the main components of an expense claim worksheet?
Different organizations may have different details listed in their claim sheets, depending on their requirements and the usual expenses as well as the type of reimbursement claims the employees are entitled to make. However, generally, the following fields are present in this type of claim worksheets.
- Date of the worksheet.
- Company details.
- Employee details.
- Dates of the incurred expense.
- Expense category.
- Expense description.
- Purpose of the expense.
- Amount.
- Receiver of the payment.
- Entitled amount.
- Difference between the entitled and incurred expense, if any.
- Signature of the employee.
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