The expense dashboard

The dashboard is the working view of Expenses: what is waiting on a decision, what is waiting on payment, and what is outstanding. It is where a claim backlog becomes visible before anyone complains about it.

Where: Expenses You need: expense rights; what you see depends on which employees they cover

What to look at, in order

Pending approvals. Claims waiting on a decision. These are people who have already spent their own money, so this queue has a human cost that a purchase-order queue does not.

Approved but unpaid. People who have been told yes and have not been paid. This is the queue most likely to be forgotten, because from the approver's side the job looks finished.

Advances outstanding. Disbursed but not liquidated — company money currently with employees. Nothing chases these on your behalf.

💡 Those three queues are the whole job. Everything else on the page is context.

Why "approved" and "paid" are separate

They are distinct states with distinct actions and often distinct people. A claim can sit approved for weeks without anyone noticing, because the approver has done their part and the payer never saw it.

If your dashboard consistently shows a pile of approved-but-unpaid claims, the problem is usually that nobody owns the payment step — see Reimbursement and payment.

What you can see

Your expense rights determine which employees appear. Two people in the same company can legitimately see very different dashboards, and a claim "missing" from yours is usually somebody else's to approve.

What Happens Next

Opening a claim shows its receipt, its type and its history.
Approving moves it toward payment; it does not pay it.
Advances stay visible until liquidated.

Tips

Check it on a fixed day each week. Expense queues do not announce themselves, and the people waiting rarely chase.
Clear approvals before payments. An unapproved claim cannot be paid, so the approval queue gates everything downstream.
Watch the outstanding-advance figure as a trend, not a number. Rising means advances are going out faster than they are being accounted for.
If a claim is not on your dashboard, check the approval route for that expense type before assuming it was never submitted — types can override the normal approvers.