Templates
Expense Claim Templates
Five expense claim structures (travel, mileage, company card, client entertainment and home office) that open in the claim form with the totals and receipt checks attached.
Overview
Why use a free expense claim template?
These free expense claim templates cover the five shapes of claim people actually submit: a business trip, a mileage claim, a company card reconciliation, client entertainment, and the costs of working from home. Each one opens in the claim form with its lines and categories already in place.
What they do not contain is any figure at all. There are no amounts, no dates and no mileage rate, because an expense claim is a signed statement rather than a draft, and a template that arrives with plausible numbers already in it is a document somebody eventually submits without reading it properly.
The layout is the least interesting part of an expense claim, which is why most templates are interchangeable. What separates a claim that is paid from one that comes back is a much shorter list: whether each line has a receipt, whether the tax on it is actually recoverable, whether a journey was business travel or a commute, and whether the personal spend on a company card was accounted for or quietly dropped. The templates are built around those.
Opening one hands its structure to the claim form, which does the totalling, counts what has no receipt and what that is worth, separates tax that can be reclaimed from tax that cannot, and produces a PDF. All of it happens in your browser and nothing is uploaded.
Step by step
How to use an expense claim template
Pick the shape of your claim
Each template covers a different kind of spending, and the cards say who each one is for.
Read the guidance
Every template comes with the things that get this kind of claim queried: commuting on a mileage claim, tax on client entertainment, the asset threshold on equipment.
Open it in the claim form
The lines and their categories carry across. Your name and employer are filled in from anything you saved previously.
Add your own figures
Amounts, dates and the mileage rate are blank because only you know them. The form totals the claim, counts what has no receipt and separates recoverable tax.
What you get
- Travel, mileage, company card, entertainment and home office
- Lines that admit where a receipt usually does not exist
- Personal spend listed and excluded, for card reconciliation
- Opens in the claim form, totals and tax included
- No amounts, no dates and no mileage rate
Background
What actually gets an expense claim returned
Very few claims are refused because of how they were laid out. They are held, queried or sent back for a small number of reasons that repeat across every organisation, and knowing them in advance is worth more than any template. The commonest by a distance is a line with no receipt: a card statement shows that you paid somebody, not what you bought, and what you bought is the thing being asked for. Marking a missing receipt is far better than leaving the cell blank, because a blank reads as an oversight and a mark reads as a statement.
Tax is the next. For a registered business the tax on an expense may be reclaimable, but generally only against a proper tax receipt, not a card slip and not a statement line. That means tax entered against an unreceipted line is not recoverable, and totalling it in with the rest quietly overstates what the business can reclaim. It is worth keeping the two apart on the claim itself rather than discovering the difference at the end of a quarter.
Mileage has its own set. A mileage rate is set by an employer and by jurisdiction and it changes, so a claim at last year's rate is a correction waiting to happen. The rate is also designed to cover fuel along with wear, insurance and depreciation, which is why claiming receipted fuel on top of mileage is claiming the same cost twice. And ordinary commuting (home to your normal workplace) is generally not claimable at all, which is the single most common error on a mileage claim.
Client entertainment is treated differently from a meal with colleagues in most jurisdictions, and frequently is neither deductible nor recoverable for tax even when it is legitimately reimbursed. The record has to be better as a result: who attended, which company they were from, and what the business purpose was. That detail is impossible to reconstruct six months later from a restaurant receipt, and it is exactly what an auditor asks for.
Finally, a company card is a different job from a claim. You are not asking for money back; you are accounting for money already spent, which means every line on the statement has to appear: including the personal spend you are not claiming. Listing it and excluding it from the total is what makes the reconciliation complete. Leaving it off makes the account short by a line, and that takes longer to explain than it took to type.
Not to be confused with
- An expense claim and a company card reconciliation
- The first asks for money back for spending you funded. The second accounts for money the business already spent, so it must include the personal lines you are not claiming. Using a claim layout for a reconciliation is how those lines get quietly dropped.
- Client entertainment and staff subsistence
- A meal with a client and a meal with colleagues are different categories with different tax treatment in most places. Putting them on one line because they happened on the same evening is the version that gets unpicked later.
- Mileage and fuel
- A mileage rate already covers fuel, plus wear, insurance and depreciation. Claiming receipted fuel as well as mileage for the same journey is claiming one cost twice, and it is a common mistake rather than a rare one.
- Business travel and commuting
- Travelling to a client or a temporary site is normally claimable; travelling to the place you usually work normally is not. The test is whether the journey is your ordinary commute, not whether it happened on a working day.
- An expense claim and an invoice
- A claim is reimbursement for money you spent on the business's behalf, at cost. An invoice charges for work, at a price you set. A contractor recharging expenses usually needs both, and combining them obscures which part is profit.
Reference
What every expense claim needs
A template gives you the structure; these are the parts that decide whether the claim is approved quickly, queried, or sent back. Roughly in the order they cause problems.
Who is claiming, and against what
Your name, any staff or supplier reference, and the department or cost centre the spending belongs to. Claims are routed and coded by these, and one without them sits waiting for somebody to work out where it goes.
Required
The period the claim covers
Most approval processes match a claim to a period, and one with no dates is the kind that waits for a question to be answered. It also stops the same receipt appearing on two claims, which is easier to do than it sounds.
Required
A date and a purpose on every line
What it was for, not just what it was. 'Taxi' tells an approver nothing they can approve; 'taxi from station to client meeting' answers the question before it is asked, and takes the same three seconds to type.
Required
Whether the receipt exists
Marked either way, never blank. A missing receipt is not fatal on its own (street parking and bus fares rarely produce one), but an unmarked missing receipt looks like an oversight, and the claim goes back for a question rather than a decision.
Required
The amount, and the tax within it
Kept separate, because only the portion supported by a proper tax receipt can be reclaimed. Tax entered against an unreceipted line is not recoverable, and adding it to the rest overstates what the business can claim back.
Required
Whether you are claiming it back
Relevant on a company card, where personal spend has to be accounted for without being reimbursed. Listing it and excluding it is a decision; leaving it off looks like a mistake.
Optional
The mileage rate, and where it came from
Look it up rather than reusing the last one you saw. Rates are set by the employer and by jurisdiction and they change, and a claim at the wrong rate is corrected by somebody else at the slowest possible moment.
Optional
Any advance already received
Money floated before the trip has to come off the claim, or the amount owed is wrong in your favour. That is the direction that costs you credibility. It also produces the case where money is owed back to the business.
Optional
A signature and an approval space
A claim is a request until somebody approves it. The space for the approver, with a date, belongs on the document rather than in the email it was attached to, where it will not be found later.
Optional
Who it helps
Who needs an expense claim form?
Employees claiming expenses
The ordinary case: a trip, a client lunch, a train fare paid personally. The whole aim is a claim that is approved without a conversation, which mostly means answering the approver's questions on the document rather than in reply to them.
Freelancers and contractors
Expenses recharged to a client have to be evidenced as carefully as an employee's, often more so, because the client has no reason to take them on trust. A claim at cost, alongside the invoice for the work, keeps reimbursement separate from profit.
Anyone with a company card
The job is reconciliation rather than reimbursement, which is why most expense templates fit it badly. Every statement line has to appear, including the ones you are not claiming, and that is what the company card template is built for.
Small businesses without an expenses system
Below a certain size an expenses platform costs more than it saves, and the alternative is usually a spreadsheet that everybody fills in differently. A consistent form with the checks built in gets most of the benefit for none of the cost.
Bookkeepers and accountants
Claims arrive from clients in every possible state, and the missing information is always the same: no purpose, no receipt marking, tax lumped in with the total. A form that asks for those up front removes most of the follow-up.
Anyone claiming mileage
Drivers visiting sites, clients or suppliers. Mileage has more ways to go wrong than any other category (the rate, the commute rule, and fuel claimed twice), and all three are avoidable if they are known in advance.
Do it properly
Best practices
Claim while you still remember why
The purpose of a journey or a meal is obvious on the day and gone within a fortnight. Claims submitted late are not just slower to pay; they are worse claims, because the detail that would have answered the approver's question has been forgotten.
Mark a missing receipt rather than leaving it blank
A blank cell reads as an oversight and invites a question. A marked missing receipt reads as a statement, and most policies accommodate a small number of them where the reason is obvious: a meter, a bus, a tip.
Split a bundled bill onto separate lines
A hotel folio covers the room, breakfast, the bar and city tax, and those are treated differently for tax and often for policy. One line for the total is the version that comes back with a request to break it down.
Look the mileage rate up every time
Rates change and vary by jurisdiction, and the one you remember is probably last year's. It takes a minute to check against your employer's policy or your tax authority's current figure, and it saves the claim being corrected by somebody else.
Keep personal spend on a card reconciliation
List it and exclude it rather than deleting the line. Whoever checks it has the statement in front of them, and an account that is short by one line takes longer to explain than the line took to type.
Check the total against what you expect to receive
Advances, non-claimable lines and unrecoverable tax all move the figure away from the sum of the receipts. Reading the final number before submitting catches the case where you have claimed less than you spent, which nobody else will correct.
Avoid these
Common mistakes
Submitting a claim with no purpose against the lines
Say what each item was for, not just what it was. An approver's first question is always the purpose, and answering it on the document turns a round trip of emails into a single approval.
Claiming mileage and fuel for the same journey
Claim one or the other. A mileage rate is set to cover fuel along with wear, insurance and depreciation, so receipted fuel on top is the same cost claimed twice: the claim form flags it when both appear.
Claiming the commute
Home to your normal workplace is generally not claimable. A journey from home directly to a client usually is. If a trip is part commute and part business, claim the additional distance rather than the whole journey.
Reclaiming tax on a line with no proper receipt
Tax is generally only recoverable against a valid tax receipt, so a card slip is not enough. Keep unsupported tax separate from recoverable tax on the claim, or the business reclaims more than it is entitled to and finds out at the worst moment.
Leaving personal spend off a company card reconciliation
Include it and mark it as not claimed. The statement has the line whether your claim does or not, and an incomplete reconciliation is returned in full rather than partly accepted.
Filling in a template that came with numbers in it
Clear every figure before you start, or use one that arrives blank. Expense claims are signed, and a plausible number that survives from an example into a submission is a false statement rather than a typo.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
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