Help Center / Expense Management

Expense Reports and Analytics

What is this page about: how expenses move through Light, from uploading a receipt to getting reimbursed. Covers the Draft, Processing, Paid, and Rejected tabs, submitting for approval, how admins approve and pay reimbursements, and exporting reimbursement data.

On this page

  • Uploading a receipt
  • The Draft tab
  • Submitting for approval
  • Tracking your expense
  • Approving and paying reimbursements (admins)
  • Exporting reimbursement data
  • Related articles

Uploading a receipt

Every expense starts with a receipt.

  1. Open Light and go to Expenses.

  2. Click Upload to open a file picker, or drag and drop files anywhere on the Draft tab.

    • Accepted file types: JPEG, PNG, HEIC, HEIF, TIFF, PDF.
    • Up to 10 files at once, up to 25MB per file.

  3. Light uploads the file and processes it in the background. You'll get a Slack or Teams notification once it's done. A new upload won't appear right away, so give it a few seconds.

  4. Once processed, the expense appears in Draft with the date and amount pre-filled where Light could read them from the receipt. Double-check these before submitting, since not every receipt extracts cleanly.

The Draft tab

Draft holds expenses you haven't submitted for reimbursement yet. This is the only tab you can edit.

  1. Go to Expenses > Draft.

  2. Review each row:

    • File: a thumbnail of the receipt. Click it to preview the full image or PDF.
    • Description and Category.
    • Cost center, if your company tracks spending by team or department (only shows if your company uses NetSuite).
    • Date.
    • Original Amount and its currency.
    • Reimbursed Amount and its currency.

  3. Click the Date column header to sort by date. It's the only sortable column, and there's no search or filter box on this table. Expenses list 20 per page.

  4. On rows that group multiple receipts together, use the row menu to Split them into separate line items, useful when one receipt covers more than one category (for example, a hotel bill that includes both lodging and meals). Delete is available on any row.

  5. Edit any field directly in the row until it's ready to send.

Submitting for approval

  1. From Draft, select the expense or expenses you're ready to send.
  2. Click Submit for approval.
  3. Your expense moves to the Processing tab, where you can track it.

Tracking your expense

Once submitted, your expense moves through a few stages before you're paid. Go to Expenses > Processing to check where it stands. This tab is read-only, so you can't edit an expense here once it's submitted.

  • Processing: your request has been created and is being set up.
  • In review: an admin is looking at it.
  • Approved: it's been approved and is moving toward payment.
  • Scheduled for payment: a payment date has been set.
  • Partially paid: some of the amount has been paid so far, and the rest is still coming.

Once it's fully paid, the expense moves automatically to Expenses > Paid, where you'll see the amount you were reimbursed.

If an admin declines your expense instead, it moves to Expenses > Rejected. Click Reset expenses there to send it back to Draft, where you can fix it and resubmit.

Approving and paying reimbursements (admins)

Reimbursements are approved and paid from the Bills side of Light, not from the employee's Expenses tab.

  1. Go to Spend management > Reimbursements, or Bills > Approving, where reimbursements appear alongside vendor invoices.
  2. Review the reimbursement, then click Approve or Reject. You can add a note when rejecting one. Keyboard shortcuts: Shift+A to approve, Shift+D to reject.
  3. An approved reimbursement moves through: Approval pending, Approved, Scheduled, then Partially paid or Paid.
  4. Once fully paid, the linked expense moves to the employee's Paid tab. A rejected reimbursement moves the linked expense to Rejected.

Exporting reimbursement data

Admins can export reimbursement data from the Bills side. The employee expense list itself has no export option.

  1. Go to Bills > Approving (or the relevant Bills tab).
  2. Use the export option to download a CSV. It respects whatever filters and visible columns you currently have set, and you can choose the delimiter.

Also searched as: How to submit an expense in Light, uploading a receipt, expense approval workflow, checking reimbursement status, Draft Processing Paid Rejected tabs, splitting an expense, resetting a rejected expense, exporting reimbursements to CSV, approving reimbursements as an admin.

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