Approving or Rejecting Your Team's Expenses

Purpose

When your company uses UZIO Expense Management, your team's expense claims can be routed to you for review. This article explains who can approve, where the queue is, what the AI check has already done, what approving or rejecting does, and what happens after approval.

Who can do this: users whose role gives them Full Access to their team members' expenses. Companies typically grant this to Reporting Managers for their direct reports, but it is not part of the Reporting Managers role automatically. With View Access you can open expenses but the Approve, Reject, Edit, and Delete actions are disabled.

When to use this: you received the daily expense summary email, or a team member tells you they have submitted an expense.

Where your queue is

Expense approval is a web task. Open Expenses in the Employer Portal. The Manage Expenses page has four tabs:

You only see the employees your access covers. Search and filters narrow the list. Tick several rows to use Approve Selected or Reject Selected.

Expense approval is not available in the UZIO Mobile App.

What the AI has already done

Every submitted expense is checked against your company's expense policy and screened for signs of fraud. The result appears on the expense as Policy Compliance, Fraud Detection, and AI remarks.

• If your company has turned on AI-based automatic approval, expenses that pass both checks are approved automatically with the approver shown as System. Only the flagged or undetermined ones reach your Pending tab.
• If it is off, every expense reaches you, with the AI results attached to help your review.
• Expenses in the Miscellaneous category never auto-approve. They matched no company category, so the policy check cannot reach a verdict.

Review an expense

Open the row's actions menu and choose View. Check:

• Receipt. It should be legible and match the amount and date claimed. The AI's policy check relies on it.
• Category and description. They should make sense for the work.
• Policy Compliance, Fraud Detection, and AI remarks. Read the remarks before you override a flag. Your decision is recorded either way.

Act on an expense

Approve, Reject, Edit, and Delete are available on the Pending tab only.

After approval

Approval is not payment. Approved expenses are reimbursed through UZIO Payroll, and only through payroll.

• A pay run picks the expense up on its own. When your payroll administrator builds the draft paycheck for a regular or special payroll, UZIO pulls in every approved expense for the employees on that run. Nobody adds it by hand. The expense does not have to fall inside that pay period either. Anything approved before the draft is built is included, however old it is.
• It appears as one line called Reimbursements. All of an employee's approved expenses are added together into a single Reimbursements earning on the pay stub, each at the full claimed amount including tax. There is no line per expense, and the amount cannot be edited on the paycheck.
• It is not taxed. The Reimbursements line is non-taxable. It is not added to taxable wages, it carries no W-2 box so it does not appear on the employee's Form W-2, and it is not treated as disposable earnings, so a wage garnishment is not calculated against it.
• The money arrives on the pay date, as part of that paycheck's net pay. The expense then moves to Paid.
• An employee who never appears on a pay run is not reimbursed by UZIO. If a team member is not paid through UZIO Payroll, or has left before another run, the expense stays at Approved and no reimbursement line is created. Your payroll administrator settles it another way.

The employee's view of the same journey is in Submitting and Tracking Your Expenses. Their tracker shows Approved both for an expense still waiting for a pay run and for one already added to a draft paycheck, so an employee cannot tell from their own screen whether payroll has picked it up. Which pay run a team member is on, and when it is approved, is your payroll administrator's call.

Notifications

UZIO does not send an email for each expense. Instead:

• You receive a daily summary email each morning listing yesterday's AI-approved expenses and the expenses still pending your review.
• The employee receives their own daily summary showing each expense's status, the AI remarks, and your comments.

When you are away

There is no delegate setting and no reminder for expenses left pending. Anyone whose role gives them Full Access to your team members' expenses, including your Employer Admin, can approve or reject in your place. Tell your HR administrator before a planned absence.

Common problems

The Approve and Reject options are greyed out

Your access to that employee's expenses is View only, or you do not have expense access for that employee at all. If you try anyway you see "You do not have access to this feature." Ask your HR administrator to review your role's expense access in Manage Users.

I cannot see a team member's expenses at all

Either the Expense module is not enabled for your company, or your role does not cover that employee's expenses. Both are set by your HR administrator.

A team member asks when they will be paid

Check the tab. Pending means nobody has decided yet. Approved means it is waiting for a pay run, or already sitting on a draft paycheck; the tab does not separate the two. Paid means the pay date has passed and the reimbursement was included in that paycheck's net pay. The money arrives on the pay date of the first regular or special payroll that includes the employee, as a single Reimbursements line. For the pay date itself, refer them to your payroll administrator.

The AI approved an expense I would have rejected

With automatic approval on, compliant and fraud-free expenses skip your queue by design, and approvals cannot be reversed in UZIO. Tell your payroll administrator before the pay run. If this happens often, ask your HR administrator to review the expense policy document the AI checks against, or to turn automatic approval off.

Related articles

• Getting Started as a Reporting Manager
• Employee side: Submitting and Tracking Your Expenses
• For admins: Reviewing and Approving Expense Reports