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Expenses Overview

This section explains how expense tracking works in Fiskl and helps you record, pay, and report on your business spending. Every expense you record posts to your accounting immediately — there is no separate posting step.

How expenses work in Fiskl · 2:44

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An expense is money your business has spent, or still owes. In Fiskl, every one is a transaction in one ledger account: Accounts Payable. The first way in is AI Expenses. Upload a receipt or a supplier invoice, or take a photo of it. Fiskl scans it and reads the vendor, the date, the amount and the tax. It suggests a category. Check it, change it if you need to, and save. Saving creates the Accounts Payable transaction: an unpaid bill, with the receipt attached. The upload stays in AI Expenses as a record: the image, and how the scan went. If a scan fails, it stays in the list. Use the row action to create the bill anyway: the file is attached and shown beside the form, so you can type in what couldn't be read. The second way skips the scan. Open Accounts Payable, add a credit, and attach the invoice. Same bill, no AI Expenses record. Both are paid the same way. When the payments arrive in your bank feed, Fiskl finds each bill. Confirm the match, and it's paid. Charging a client for one? Open the bill, pick the client, and mark it billable. On their invoice, add it as an expense line. Send it, and the client pays you. That doesn't settle the bill. You paid it from your own account, so like any Accounts Payable bill it stays due until it's matched with the payment in your bank or cash account. If you had expenses in the old Expenses list, it is still there, but closed to new entries. Select them and convert them to Accounts Payable. Anything already matched, or already on an invoice, stays where it is. The third way has no Accounts Payable at all. You wait for the payment to arrive from your bank. Then categorise it as an expense, and optionally attach the receipt. It's recorded, and it always shows as paid. Be careful not to categorise a bank transaction when the bill is already in Accounts Payable. It counts twice, and the bill stays due. Match it instead; automation usually does this for you. To see what you spent, use the two Expenses reports, under Accounting, Reports. Expenses groups every expense by category, with a subtotal, and marks each one paid, due or overdue. Expenses by Vendor shows the same expenses by who you paid, biggest first. Both total the same as your Profit and Loss. Three ways in, one place, two reports.

Why Track Expenses in Fiskl​

Recording expenses in Fiskl gives you a complete, always-current picture of your spending. Because expenses post to your accounting automatically, your reports and tax figures stay accurate without extra bookkeeping work.

Key benefits:

  • Upload a receipt and let AI extract the vendor, amounts, and taxes
  • Record bills before you pay them and track what is due or overdue
  • Categorise bank transactions directly with no extra steps
  • See all spending by category in the Expenses report

Key Concepts​

  • AI Expenses: The place to upload receipts and supplier invoices, or create expenses manually. Each saved expense becomes an Accounts Payable transaction.
  • Accounts Payable: The ledger account that tracks what your business owes and has paid to vendors. Expenses recorded through AI Expenses live here.
  • Expense category: The ledger account that describes what the money was spent on, such as Fuel & Mileage or Office Supplies. Categories display expenses — you never create expenses inside them.
  • Matching: Linking a bank transaction to an expense in Accounts Payable. Matching marks the expense as paid and never removes your categories.
  • Traditional Expenses: Fiskl's legacy expense list. It is locked for new entries, and existing records can be migrated to Accounts Payable.

How It Works​

There are two ways to record an expense, and both produce the same accounting result:

  1. Record it in AI Expenses — Upload a receipt or create the expense manually. It saves to Accounts Payable, and you match the bank transaction to it when the payment appears.
  2. Categorise the bank transaction — If the payment already shows in your bank account in Fiskl, select a category and save. Nothing else is needed.

See How to Add Expenses for a full walkthrough of both methods, and the Expenses report to review everything by category with payment status.

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If your account has records in the legacy expense system, a Traditional Expenses list is still visible. It is view-only — you can migrate eligible records to Accounts Payable in bulk. New accounts do not see this list.

Available Guides​