How To: Add and scan expenses in Teamleader Focus

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With the new Expense Management feature in Teamleader Focus, keeping your finances in check has never been easier. From uploading receipts to approving incoming invoices, everything happens in one place—fast, smart, and seamlessly. Enjoy real-time insights, automation, and smooth collaboration with your bookkeeper. In this article, we’ll show you how to add and scan expenses in Teamleader Focus.
 

 

Do you prefer to watch our instructive video first? You can do so right here:

 

What

If you’re already using Teamleader Focus for your outgoing invoices, subscriptions and credit notes, you’d probably like to have an overview of incoming documents as well.

Expense management provides the following benefits:

  • Upload and keep track of incoming invoices, credit notes and receipts
  • Scan expenses directly to Teamleader Focus via OCR (Optical character recognition)
    • Skip manual work: we will extract the data for you and fill it out automatically in the appropriate fields
    • Review and confirm your expenses after they’ve been uploaded or scanned
  • Mark your expenses as approved, pending or refused: keep track of which expenses are ready to be paid, which expenses you still need to check or which expenses aren’t correct. Read all about it in this article.
  • Send approved expenses to your bookkeeper and consequently keep an overview of which expenses have already been sent. Read all about it here.
  • Search and filter: easily search the information you need or create filters to find the expenses right when you need them. Read all about it here.
  • Activity feed: for every expense you’ll find an ‘Activities’ tab to display all changes e.g. approving/refusing the expense or sending it to your bookkeeper.
  • Peppol (for Belgian company entities): If you’ve already enabled Peppol in your account, you’ll receive your e-invoices directly in Teamleader Focus. Approve or refuse these and this review status gets sent back via Peppol too. 

 

Who

  • Everyone with access to Invoices has access to Expenses by default too.
  • You can easily disable access to expenses via Settings > Users > three dots next to the name of the user > Edit > disable the slider next to ‘Expenses’:


     
  • Note that it’s not possible to disable access to invoices for a certain user and only enable expenses, as expenses are an integral part of invoices.
     

How

There are three ways to add expenses to your Teamleader Focus account:

Upload & scan your expenses automatically

! Important to know is that in all Teamleader Focus accounts, expenses will be scanned* automatically by default, that’s why we start explaining this option first. 
*Scanning of your expenses will happen via OCR. OCR is short for ‘Optical character recognition’, which essentially means that all information will be fetched from your file and filled out automatically in Teamleader Focus.



You can turn off this setting via Settings > Expenses > Preferences > Disable the slider next to ‘Automatically scan all expenses’ .
 

Follow these steps to start adding expenses:

  1. Navigate to Expenses via the navigation menu.
  2. To upload a file or multiple files, click on Upload in the top right-hand corner or drag and drop your file(s) here:


    Notes:
    • You can only upload 10 files in 1 go
    • The maximum size of a file is 20 MB
    • The format needs to be PDF, PNG, JPG, JPEG, HEIC, or GIF.
       
    • There’s a maximum of 30 free scans every month. At the start of every month, the counter in the top right-hand corner of your expense overview resets to 30. Scans you haven’t used will be lost. 

      Once the free scan limit is reached, an admin can enable the Teamleader Focus wallet to continue scanning documents. Navigate to Settings > Expenses > Preferences > ‘Use Teamleader Wallet when free scans are used up’. 


      Every scan will cost €0.20 and will be deducted from your wallet. Top up your wallet here or read all about it in this article. 
       
  3. After selecting your file(s), scanning of the document will start:

     
  4. The file is now scanned and ready for you to review. Click on Review:
     
  5. In the next screen you’ll find a visual representation of your file on the left, with the document details on the right of the screen. 



    Thanks to OCR, all fields will be filled out automatically (like amount, due date, payment reference or the document type - invoice, credit note or receipt), but you can of course always change the data manually here. 

    Note: The field ‘supplier’ will also be auto-selected if a supplier is already a known customer in your account. Know that we don’t distinguish between regular contacts/companies or suppliers in your account, but if you want to search on expenses per supplier you can always do that via your expenses overview. Find more information on search and filtering in expenses here.
     
  6. When you’ve reviewed everything, click on Save in the top right-hand corner. You’ll be redirected to the detail page of the expense where you’ll find:
    • A header with all the information related to the expense. Here, you can still edit the expense via the pencil, download the PDF of your expense, customise the header or delete the expense.

       
    • Mark the expense as approved, pending or refused: via this button you can keep track of which expenses are ready to be paid, which expenses you still need to check or which expenses aren’t correct. Read all about it in this article.

       
    • Configure bookkeeping email/Send to bookkeeper: only approved documents can be sent to your bookkeeper. Read all about setting a bookkeeping email address and sending your expenses to your bookkeeper here.
    • In the Details tab you find an activity feed of your expense, making it possible to track every action related to your expense (e.g. changing the review status, sending it to your bookkeeper etc.). 
       

What if my scan failed?

If there’s a technical error during scanning then you won’t lose a free scan, or - if you’ve already used up your free scans - we won’t charge you for the scan.

There are two exceptions when a free scan will be subtracted anyway, so be cautious of the following things before uploading a file:

  • When the file is password protected
  • When the file is a blank page
     

Upload your expenses and fill out the information manually

If you disable the automatic scanning of your expenses in your Settings > Expenses, then you can of course still upload your expenses and click on Scan manually (or when your free scans are used up, just fill out all the information manually).


 

  1. Navigate to Invoices > Expenses and click on Upload to upload one or several files.
  2. The file will be added to the ‘In review’ section with the label ‘New’ attached to it:
     
  3. Click on Review to review the document and fill out the remaining fields.

    You can still choose to scan this file by checking the box next to the expense in the expenses overview and choose ‘Scan’, or by clicking on Scan in the document details.


     
  4. When all the fields are filled out, save the file to add the expense to your overview.
     

Peppol integration (e-invoices only)

! This section is only relevant if you have a Belgian company entity.
 

A third way to add expenses, and more specifically incoming invoices, to your Teamleader Focus account is to let them be added automatically via Peppol.
 

Click here to set up Peppol or follow the steps in this article to enable Peppol in your account. Not only will you be able to send your outgoing invoices via Peppol, your incoming invoices will end up in your Expenses overview too.
 


If the supplier of the invoice is not known yet, then a new company will be created in your CRM automatically.

Now that you know everything about adding expenses, it’s time for the next steps. Click here to find more information on: 

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