An advance is the mirror image of a claim: the company gives you money up front — a travel float, a project imprest — and you owe it back. The debt is cleared either by setting the advance off against the expense claims you file, or by returning the unspent cash. Every step posts a journal, so the outstanding advance is a real ledger balance, aged and reconciled like any other.
Prerequisites
- Access to the Expense Advance entity in the Expenses app.
- The requester's employee record — advances, like claims, are anchored on it.
- For paying and settling (finance): an Employee Advance control account configured as a current asset, and the bank account to pay from — see Configuring Expense Management.
Procedure
Step 1 — Request the advance
Open Expense Advances, choose New, and confirm the employee resource before entering the requested amount and a purpose specific enough for an approver to judge. The current create layout does not expose a currency, advance date or project field, so do not use the form as evidence that those dimensions were captured. Save once and reopen the record: it should start as Requested, have no payment reference and show the exact requested amount without an outstanding balance yet.
Step 2 — Get it approved
Submit through the configured approval process. Confirm the request becomes pending, the expected approver resolves, and maker-checker or amount thresholds add the required controls. The approver should review employee, purpose, amount and allocation before deciding. Finance must verify the terminal Approved state and full decision trail; an email or verbal approval is not a substitute for the record's approval status.
Step 3 — Pay the advance (finance)
On the approved record, choose Pay Advance, select the verified bank account and compare the confirmation amount with the approval before submitting once. Treat the Approved check as an operator control: the current pay handler does not itself reject a non-approved status. The posting debits employee-advance, credits bank and creates a recoverable open balance. Open the journal and verify date, employee, accounts and amount; the advance must read Paid and outstanding must equal the payment. Do not retry a direct posting: unlike approval-event replay, which skips an already-posted event, a direct repost can throw rather than return a harmless success.
Step 4 — Settle it against a claim (finance)
Wait until the related claim is both approved and posted, then choose Settle Against Claim and confirm employee, currency, claim open payable and advance outstanding all agree. Enter no more than the smaller balance and submit once. Open the resulting settlement and journal: both open items should fall by the same amount, and neither may go negative. Repeat with separate claims only for a remaining balance. When outstanding reaches zero verify the advance is Settled; when the claim also reaches zero verify it is no longer offered for reimbursement.
Step 5 — Recover the unspent balance (finance)
When all claims are accounted for, collect the unspent cash and choose Recover Advance. Select the bank account that actually received it and compare the entered amount with both the receipt and current outstanding; the default is the full remaining balance but partial recovery is allowed. After posting, verify bank debit and employee-advance credit, attach the receipt reference, and reconcile the new outstanding. A zero balance must close as Recovered; a partial balance remains open for another settlement or recovery.
Expected result
The approved advance posts once against the configured employee-advance and bank accounts, its outstanding balance equals the amount still owed, and each claim settlement or cash recovery reduces that balance with a separate auditable record. A zero balance closes in the appropriate Settled or Recovered state.
Common problems
Settle Against Claim is refused with "Claim is not posted." Settlement works open balance against open balance, so the claim must be approved and posted first. Post the claim (final approval does this automatically), then settle.
"Nothing to settle." One of the two balances is already zero — the advance was consumed by earlier settlements, or the claim's payable was already cleared. Check both balances before retrying.
Pay Advance fails naming a missing control account. The Employee Advance control account is not configured, or is not set up as a current asset. That is a one-time configuration fix; the error message names exactly what is missing.
The advance shows partially settled and refuses to close. An advance closes only when its outstanding amount reaches zero — through settlements, recoveries, or both. Settle the remaining claims or recover the remainder in cash.
Common questions
My claim is bigger than my advance — what happens?
The settlement consumes the advance fully and leaves the rest of the claim's payable open. You are reimbursed the difference through the normal reimbursement run. Claim minus advance is exactly what lands in your bank.
My advance is bigger than my claim — what happens?
The settlement clears the claim completely (it is marked paid — nothing is owed to you) and the advance keeps the difference as its outstanding balance. Either file further claims against it or return the unspent cash, which closes the advance.
Where can finance see who owes what?
The employee-payable ageing view can fold in the advance balances, showing per employee both what the company owes (unpaid claims) and what the employee owes (open advances) — aged into the standard buckets. Because it reads the same open items the postings maintain, it ties to the control account by construction; see Expense accounting.