How to run expense claims for a field sales team

A field rep pays for things every day: fuel to reach the customer, parking outside the office, a toll on the highway, coffee with a buyer. The money comes out of their pocket and comes back weeks later, if the slip survived the car seat. For the manager the problem runs the other way: a stack of claims arrives at month end, nobody remembers which visit a taxi was for, and approving them turns into an evening of guessing.

None of this needs a finance system. It needs a short policy, a habit of claiming the same day, one named approver per person and a fixed day for paying. The rest of this article walks through each part.

Write the policy on one page

Many arguments over claims come from rules nobody wrote down. Before anyone claims anything, put these on a single page and share it with the team:

• What can be claimed. Name the categories: travel, fuel, food, hotel, phone and internet, client meetings, parking and tolls, supplies. Leave out the ones you do not pay for, rather than rejecting them one by one later.
• How travel in a personal vehicle is paid. Either the actual fuel bill or a fixed rate per kilometre. A rate is simpler for everyone: the rep enters the distance and the amount follows. Check what your country’s tax rules say about mileage rates before you pick a number.
• When a receipt is needed. Asking for one on every coffee costs more in admin than the coffee. A threshold works better: no receipt below a small amount, always a receipt above it.
• How far back a claim may go. A limit, such as the last few weeks, stops old costs turning up months later when nobody can check them.
• Who approves, and when people get paid.

Claim on the day, not at month end

Start with timing. A claim made the same evening has a receipt that still exists, a note the rep can still write from memory and an approver who can still ask a question. A claim made four weeks later has none of those.

Make it easy enough to do from the car park. A claim should take a date, a category, the amount, one line on what it was for and a photo of the receipt (or the PDF, when the bill came by email). If the cost was for a particular customer, link it to that customer, so the manager sees the claim next to the deal it served.

One approver per person

Claims stall when everybody can approve and nobody feels they must. Give each rep one approver, normally their team lead, who knows where they went that week. Owners and admins can approve anyone’s claims as a backstop, for holidays and for people without a team lead. Nobody approves their own claim, managers included; the owner, who has nobody above them, is the one exception.

Approve on a rhythm the team can rely on, for example every afternoon or twice a week. The queue stays short and reps stop chasing.

Reject with a reason, and let people fix it

A rejection with no explanation reads as distrust and usually produces an argument. Make the reason compulsory and specific: the receipt is missing, the hotel was over the agreed rate, the phone bill is the personal plan rather than the work SIM. Then let the rep correct the claim and send it again, instead of starting a new one. The history stays in one place and the second look takes seconds.

Pay on a fixed day, with a reference

Pick a payment day, weekly or every two weeks, and pay everything approved by then. Record how each claim was paid, a bank transfer reference or “Cash”, at the moment you pay it. When a rep says they never got the money, the answer is one search away rather than a trawl through bank statements.

Keep approving and paying as separate steps, and if you can, done by different people. The team lead knows whether the trip happened; the owner or the accounts person knows whether the money went out.

Review the month by person and category

Once a month, look at the totals by person and by category. Patterns show up quickly: one rep’s fuel is twice everyone else’s on the same routes, client meetings jump in the month a big deal closed, parking costs suggest a territory needs a different plan. Treat these as questions for a one-to-one, not as accusations. Export the month for your accountant in the same sitting.

A starter policy

Running it in LumaKol

If your team already logs calls and visits in LumaKol, expense claims sit in the same workspace on the web. People attach the receipt as a photo or a PDF, saved to their own Google Drive, or enter kilometres for travel and fuel at the rate per km you set. Team leads approve or reject their team’s claims, a rejection needs a reason, and a claim above your receipt amount cannot be approved until the receipt is there. Owners, admins and billing admins mark approved claims paid with a reference, and All claims shows the month by person and category with a CSV or Excel export. The setup takes a few minutes; the expense claims guide has every step, and the feature page has the overview.