There are occasions when the best way to pay for an expense is with cash. On these occasions, an Expend cardholder can withdraw money with their Expend card to pay for the expense and then report a cash expense. The amount withdrawn is shown as Outstanding Cash on the Expenses page on the web app and on the Expenses screen in the Expend app. Note that:

When you report a cash expense, the maximum amount a user can enter is determined by the amount of cash they have withdrawn. This ensures that users can’t claim for more than they have withdrawn. After creating a report, the amount claimed is deducted from the user's Outstanding Cash balance.

Another important thing to note is that reporting cash expenses is only available after the date that the feature became available to Expend customers. Cash withdrawals made before this are not listed, and users can’t report cash expenses before this date.

If you are using Expend’s integration with Xero, you must set up an additional control account, Cash Withdrawal, to keep track of Expend card cash withdrawals. The Cash Withdrawal control account must be mapped to a Current Asset account in Xero. For more information about setting up control accounts, see Set up your Expend integration with Xero.

You can keep track of all activity by users who have withdrawn cash with their Expend cards to pay for cash expenses.

To see how much cash each user has that hasn’t been accounted for, open the Expend web app, go to MANAGE, click Reporting, select Reports, and click Cash management.

The Cash Management Report page that opens shows the current outstanding cash balance for each user for each currency in which they have withdrawn cash. So if a user has withdrawn cash both in British pounds and in euros, there will be separate entries for that user.

You can also see all activity involving cash withdrawn from a user’s Expend card, including withdrawals, expenses reported, and returned funds. In the web app, click Reports, click Cash management, and then select the user and currency on the Cash Management Report page. This will show you all the activity for that user in that currency.

After a user has paid for an expense using the cash they have withdrawn from their Expend card, they can return the remaining cash to the company. You can record cash that is returned as follows:

The amount is deducted from the user’s Outstanding Cash balance, so they can longer report cash expenses on it. The return is also added to the user’s Cash Management Summary report.

If the returned cash is deposited to the company bank account, there will be a deposit transaction that needs to be reconciled in your accounting system. At this point, you can create a transfer from the Expend Cash Account to the account to which the money was deposited. If the returned cash is used to pay for something else, the transaction should also be picked up by a reconciliation, and the necessary transfer or transaction should also be created to account for it.