Free expense report template

What an expense report should include

Finance teams reject expense claims for the same handful of reasons: no receipt, no business purpose, no approval, or arithmetic that does not add up. A complete report closes off each of those before it is submitted. At minimum it should carry:

• The employee’s name, job title or staff ID, and department, so the claim can be matched to payroll.
• The business name and the reporting period — a single trip, a week, or a calendar month for a monthly expense report.
• A purpose line: the client visit, project or event the spending relates to.
• One line per expense with the date, a category, a short description, the amount paid and whether a receipt is attached.
• The VAT included in each receipt, where the supplier charged it, so it can be reclaimed if the business is VAT-registered.
• Totals by category, the overall total, any cash advance already paid, and the balance due to the employee (or back to the company).
• A signature and date from the employee, and the approver’s name, title, signature and date.

The template above produces all of that in one page. It works as an expense claim form for a single employee, a trip report, or a monthly expense report for a small team that pays staff back once a month.

How to fill in an expense report for reimbursement

1. Collect every receipt for the period first. A receipt you cannot find on the day you submit is usually a receipt you never find.
2. Enter the report details: your name, role, department, the business, the period, and what the spending was for.
3. Add one line per receipt. Use the date on the receipt, not the date you remembered to claim it, and pick the category that matches how your accountant books it.
4. Enter the amount you actually paid, including any VAT, and tick “VAT incl.” if the receipt shows 7.5% VAT. The template works out the VAT inside the amount for you.
5. Mark whether each line has a receipt. Lines without one are flagged in the totals so your approver sees them up front rather than discovering them later.
6. Enter any cash advance you received before the trip. The report subtracts it and shows the balance due to you — or the amount you need to return if you spent less than you were advanced.
7. Add the approver’s name, download the PDF, sign it and send it with the receipts. Keep the CSV if your finance team imports claims into a spreadsheet.

Expense categories that make sense in Nigeria

Categories exist so the claim can be posted to the right line in the accounts and so a manager can see where money is going. Too many and people guess; too few and everything lands in “other”. The template ships with the categories below, which map cleanly onto a small business chart of accounts. Our guide to business expense categories goes deeper on which ones to watch.

VAT on expense receipts: working out the 7.5%

Nigeria’s VAT rate is 7.5%. On a receipt the VAT is almost always already inside the price you paid, so the claim amount is the gross figure. To find the VAT inside it, divide by 107.5 and multiply by 7.5 — which is the same as multiplying the gross by about 0.0698. Subtracting 7.5% from the gross gives the wrong answer, and always slightly too much VAT.

Example: a hotel bill of ₦53,750 including VAT. VAT = ₦53,750 × 7.5 ÷ 107.5 = ₦3,750. The cost before VAT is ₦50,000. The employee is reimbursed the full ₦53,750, because that is what they paid; the ₦3,750 is the figure your accountant needs if the business is VAT-registered and wants to claim the input VAT.

VAT can only be reclaimed with a proper tax invoice or receipt from a VAT-registered supplier, which is one more reason to insist on receipts. If your business is below the ₦25 million registration threshold and not registered, VAT is simply part of the cost and the VAT column is for information only. The VAT calculator handles one-off checks in either direction.

Cash advances and the balance due

Many Nigerian businesses hand staff cash before a trip rather than asking them to fund it. The expense report is where that advance is retired. Total the expenses, subtract the advance, and the difference is either owed to the employee or owed back to the business. Leaving advances unretired is one of the most common gaps auditors find in small company books, because the cash has left the business with nothing to show what it bought.

Receipts, approvals and tax treatment

A reimbursement is not extra pay: it puts back money the employee spent on the business. That distinction is why the receipt matters. A documented reimbursement of an actual business cost is generally kept out of the employee’s taxable pay, while a round-sum allowance paid without receipts can be treated as part of employment income under PAYE. If you pay fixed allowances, run them through payroll; the PAYE calculator shows the effect on take-home pay.

The same logic applies when a contractor passes costs on to a client. Reimbursements of costs that are separately documented are outside withholding tax, so a consultant who invoices fees and re-billed expenses on separate lines, with receipts, avoids having WHT deducted from the expenses as well as the fee.

Set a simple policy and put it in writing: claims within 30 days of the spend, receipts required above a small amount, and one approver who is not the claimant. For a missing receipt, ask for a short signed note of the date, supplier, amount and purpose, and keep those exceptions rare.

How long to keep expense reports

Section 31 of the Nigeria Tax Administration Act 2025 requires every person to keep books and records, in English, for at least six years after the year of assessment they relate to — whether or not tax turns out to be due. Expense reports and the receipts behind them are part of those records. A tax officer reviewing a deduction for travel or entertainment will ask for exactly this document.

Thermal-paper receipts from POS terminals fade within months, so photograph or scan them when you submit the claim and file the image with the signed PDF. A dated folder per month is enough for a small business; what matters is that you can find a specific receipt years later.

Excel template, PDF, or software?

An expense report template in Excel works until two people edit the same file or a formula gets overwritten. This tool keeps the arithmetic fixed and gives you a clean PDF to sign and a CSV to open in Excel or Google Sheets, so you get the convenience of a spreadsheet without maintaining one. Your entries stay in your own browser and are not sent to ereQa.

Once expense claims are a monthly routine rather than an occasional one, keeping them in an expense tracker saves re-typing. In ereQa you can log an expense or scan a receipt photo to pre-fill the amount, date and category, and export the ledger as CSV for your accountant. The Free plan includes 25 expenses a month. If the spending is going to be billed on to a client, the free invoice generator produces the invoice, and the profit margin calculator shows what the job really made after costs.