01
Claim submission
Category, amount, currency, the date the cost was incurred and a description — submitted from the mobile app by the person who paid.
Expenses & claims · approval is not payment
In most expense tools a claim closes the moment a manager clicks approve, and the person who is actually out of pocket finds out weeks later that nothing moved. Flume keeps a claim open until the payroll run carrying it has been paid — so “approved but not yet reimbursed” is a number you can report on rather than a gap nobody owns.
Closes when the run actually pays, not when someone clicked approve.
Follow the money
Step a claim through its life and watch what each stage actually establishes. Approval records a decision. Attaching it to a run gives it a route. Only the run paying out makes it reimbursed — and until then it stays on the books as something the company owes.
A 2,480.00 EGP travel claim, at stage
A decision, its author and its timestamp are recorded — but no money has moved, and the claim is deliberately not closed.
An approved claim links to a payroll adjustment on a specific run. The claim’s status follows that run, not the approver’s click.
What ships
01
Category, amount, currency, the date the cost was incurred and a description — submitted from the mobile app by the person who paid.
02
Travel, meals, accommodation, supplies and other, so spend can be grouped without every claim being free text.
03
Supporting documents hang off the claim through the same document store, with the same versioning and retention.
04
A pending list for approvers, with the decision, its author, its timestamp and an optional note kept on the claim.
05
A rejected claim keeps why, so the same expense does not simply get resubmitted unchanged next month.
06
An approved claim becomes a payroll adjustment on a named run rather than a separate payment nobody reconciles.
07
The claim closes only once that run has actually paid out, so its status reflects the money and not the intent.
08
By category, department and period — including approval turnaround and the lag between approval and reimbursement.
09
The claim set out to a spreadsheet for finance, with the same figures the approval queue and the payroll run used.
How it actually works
Approval and reimbursement are stored as separate facts with separate timestamps, and the claim only reads reimbursed once the linked payroll run has paid. Closing on approval makes the queue look clean while people are still out of pocket — which is exactly the state you would want a report to surface, not hide.
An approved claim is attached to a payroll adjustment on a specific run. Paying expenses through a side channel is how a company ends up with reimbursements that never appear in labour cost, never reach the bank file, and have to be reconciled by hand at year end.
Both are recorded. A claim submitted in September for a trip taken in July belongs to July for cost analysis and to September for cash flow, and only keeping both dates lets a report answer either question honestly.
The approver, the moment and any note stay on the claim, and the approver is a reference to a person rather than a copied name — so a decision still resolves after that manager has moved department or left. Expense fraud investigations start by asking who approved this, and the answer should not be a string somebody typed.
Book a demo
The fastest way to judge Flume is to run it against a period you already argued about. Send a month of punches and the payroll you produced from it, and we will show you the same month reconciled — including what the anomaly detectors flag.