Introduction to Event Expenses and Reimbursement

Expenses are the money an event spends without a purchase order: parking, an ice run, a crew member's hotel, the hardware store trip at load-in. They never go through procurement or an order, but they are real cost, and some of them are owed back to the person who paid.

Why Expenses Matter

This spend usually lives in a shoebox of receipts and a spreadsheet someone updates after the show. By the time it is totalled, nobody remembers which budget line the ice was meant to come out of, and the crew member who fronted their hotel is chasing an email thread to get paid back.

The cost of that is not just admin. Spend that was never planned for disappears into the final number, so the show looks like it went over budget for reasons nobody can point to. BackOps makes that spend visible as it happens: every expense either points at the budget line that planned for it or is counted as unbudgeted, and every expense paid out of someone's pocket shows as owed until it is paid back.

How Expenses Work

An expense is a document of its own, not a line on an order. It has a name, a date, a payee, an optional receipt file, and one or more lines, each a description, quantity and unit price. Its total is always the sum of its lines.

Budgeted or unbudgeted. An expense can point at one line of an Accepted or Paid proposal, the line that budgeted for it. That link is what makes the expense count toward the line's actual cost on the proposal's Budget tab. An expense with no link is unbudgeted, and the Expenses page totals unbudgeted spend on its own so it cannot hide. A receipt that covers two budget lines is recorded as two expenses.

Payee and reimbursement. The payee says who paid. When the company paid (a company card, petty cash), there is No payee and the expense is Recorded. When a crew member or a collaborator paid, the expense is Owed to them until it is paid back. Paying back runs through an order: you gather one person's expenses onto a reimbursement order and record payment there, the same way you pay a vendor, and the expenses turn Paid.

flowchart LR
    E["Expense"] -->|"Budget"| B["Proposal line"]
    E -->|"No payee"| R(["Recorded"])
    E -->|"Crew or Collaborator"| O(["Owed"])
    O -->|"Reimbursement order paid"| P(["Paid"])

Lax intake. An expense saves with only a name and a payee. Missing pieces are flagged rather than refused, so you can drop a stack of receipt photos at the end of a day and fill in the details later. Receipt reading can propose the date and lines from the receipt itself; nothing lands until you accept it.

Expenses are an event admin tool: the Expenses page under Resourcing is available to event admins.