NGO expense claim best practices
How Cambodian NGOs can structure expense claims, cash advances, and reimbursements to keep donor audits simple.
Structure claims by project, not employee
Donor audits follow project budgets. Every claim should be taggable to a project code and a budget line from day one — retrofitting this during an audit is expensive.
Approval rules that scale
- Amount thresholds that route automatically to the right role
- Separate cash advance clearance from reimbursement
- Attach each receipt to the claim line it belongs to, not to the claim as a whole
How a claim moves through Humaneti
Reimbursements and cash advances are two different paths on purpose: one repays money a person already spent, the other lends money that must later be accounted for. Mixing them is what leaves advances open for months.
- 1EmployeeDraft
Raise the claim line by line
A claim is a set of lines, not one amount. Each line carries its own category, amount, receipt, and split across projects, donors, and budget lines — so a single trip that served two grants is coded correctly at entry instead of being unpicked at audit.
- 2Employee
Scan the receipt instead of typing it
A photographed receipt can be read into a claim line rather than keyed in. The image stays attached either way — the scan saves the typing, not the evidence.
- 3EmployeePending approval
Submit, and the route is resolved
Submitting resolves the approval workflow for this claimant and assigns the first approver. The same engine that routes purchase requests routes claims, so an organisation configures approval authority once rather than per module.
- 4ApproverApproved / Rejected
Each step decides and is recorded
Every decision writes an approval record: who, which step, the outcome, the comment, the time. A rejected claim returns to the claimant editable and can be corrected and resubmitted — the earlier decisions stay on the record rather than being erased.
- 5FinancePaid
Finance settles the approved claim
Only an approved claim can be marked paid, and a paid claim can no longer be cancelled. The split recorded at entry is what carries into the ledger, so the donor report and the payment agree without a reconciliation step.
- 6EmployeeAdvance: Disbursed → Cleared
The cash advance path, and how it closes
An advance is requested, approved, and disbursed as its own record. It stays open until a clearance lists what was actually spent — with the same per-line project and donor splits — and settles the difference. Until then the balance is visible as outstanding against that person.