From recorded trips, meals, and receipts, ZEP automatically generates a consolidated expense report: the official document for reimbursement. It contains all daily flat rates, meal deductions, mileage, receipts, and advance payments already made.
See your own expense report
Under Reports > My Reports > Times and Costs > Cost Accounting, employees see their own expense report as a preview. ZEP automatically aggregates all trips, meals, and receipts of the selected period with preliminary amounts.
The own expense report is purely a preview. Employees see the amounts and can download the PDF or have it sent to themselves by email. Saving, submitting, or forwarding to accounting is done by the checking person.
Create the expense report
Administrators, controllers, and department managers (for their assigned employees) create the expense report via Employees > [Person] > Travel and Costs > Cost Accounting. There all trips, meals, and receipts of the selected period are automatically consolidated into the report.
Set filters
Before creating, you select:
Period: travel date from/to (usually a calendar month)
Project: optional, to restrict the report to a single project
Currency: for multiple currencies per employee
Contents of the report
The expense report calculates automatically:
Daily allowances: split into tax-free and taxable shares, with meal deductions when a daily allowance procedure is active
Mileage: from recorded trip kilometers and the vehicle rate
Arrival allowances: from the project and customer travel settings
Receipts: sum of all assigned receipts of the period, broken down by expense type
Total reimbursement gross: sum of all the above, less any advance payments already made
Advance payments already made (e.g., cash travel advance) are entered in the Advance payment field. ZEP deducts the amount from the total reimbursement.
Check the expense report
Clicking the Save as checked button saves the expense report in its current form. The period of the report is then locked: bookings can no longer be changed without first deleting the checked report.
Note: If the output format needs to be changed afterward (e.g., portrait instead of landscape), delete the saved report in the table of checked expense reports and save it again in the new format.
Send email to employees
The table of expense reports under Reports > Employees > Management > Cost Accounting is divided into two sections:
Unchecked cost accounting reports: preliminary calculations that have not yet been saved. These rows cannot be sent yet.
Checked cost accounting reports: reports already saved via Save as checked. Only these can be sent by email.
An expense report can only be sent once it has been saved as checked. In the table of checked reports, two send paths are available:
Individual send: via the email icon in the column sent as email. If the report has already been sent, the column shows the last send date and recipient address; clicking again resends it.
Bulk send: select multiple rows via the checkbox, choose action Send via email, and execute. ZEP sends a separate email per selection.
ZEP sends an email to the recipient address with the report as a PDF in the configured format. With the receipt module active, all associated receipt files are bundled and attached. With the email, the timestamp email date is set in the report.
Note: Sending emails requires an active ZEP mail client. If the mail client is not configured, neither the icon in the table nor the action Send via email in the bulk operation appears.
Document the payout
After the transfer, the payout is documented in ZEP. You record the payouts per employee via Employees > [Person] > Travel and Costs > Disbursement documentation.
Date: date of the payout
Amount: must cover the outstanding claim from the expense report
Project: for project-related reports
The payout is automatically linked to the associated expense report and appears in the payout report. Alternatively, in the table of checked cost accounting reports, you can select multiple rows and execute the bulk operation Generate payment; ZEP then enters a payment per selection over the respective outstanding amount. Alternatively, in the table of checked cost accounting reports, you can select multiple rows and execute the bulk operation Generate payment — ZEP then enters a payment per selection over the respective outstanding amount. If needed, checked expense reports can subsequently be handed over to Export for Accounting (only in ZEP Professional).
Credit notes for freelancers
Note: This section only appears for freelancers with credit-note billing.
For freelancers, the expense report is formulated as a credit note. The freelancer does not issue an invoice; instead, ZEP creates a credit note for them. The creation process matches that of the regular expense report; instead of the button Save as checked, the button Create credit note appears.