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When Expense Management is enabled, each card transaction becomes an expense record assigned to the cardholder. Your job is to fill in the required details and submit it before your policy deadline.

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Finding your expenses

Go to Expenses in the left-hand navigation. The Transactions page lists all expenses assigned to you, grouped by status across six tabs: Each tab shows a live count badge so you can see at a glance how many items need attention.

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Expense statuses

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Filling in an expense

Click any expense row to open the expense sheet. The sheet has three tabs: Overview, Notes, and Activity.

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Spend category

Select a spend category from the dropdown. Dash.fi suggests one based on the merchant and transaction context. The suggestion appears with a sparkle icon at the top of the list, along with a brief explanation. Accept it or pick a different one. Categories can also be set directly from the table without opening the sheet — click the category cell in any row.

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Memo

Type a description of what the purchase was for. The memo saves automatically as you type.

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Receipt

Attach the receipt using the receipt section:
  • Click to open the file picker, or drag and drop a file onto the receipt area
  • Accepted formats: JPG, PNG, PDF
  • Maximum file size: 10 MB
After uploading, the filename is shown with a View receipt link (opens in a new tab) and a Replace button. To swap the receipt, click Replace and upload a new file. Your company’s policy determines whether a receipt is required before you can submit. If your policy sets a minimum amount, only expenses above that threshold require one.

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Other ways to add a receipt

Pick whichever is closest to where the receipt lives:
  • Forward it by email. Every Dash.fi user has a personal receipt inbox address in the form <slug>@receipts.dash.fi. Forward a receipt to it from any email client and Dash.fi imports each attachment as its own receipt on your account, then runs the same OCR and transaction matcher. Find and copy your address from the mobile app under Receipts → + → Email a receipt. Only forwards from your own sign-in address are accepted, and imported receipts stay locked to you as the creator — teammates can’t see or claim them. See Forwarding a receipt by email for the supported attachment types, per-attachment outcomes, and rejection reasons.
  • Snap it on mobile. Use the Dash.fi iOS or Android app to photograph a paper receipt or pick an image from your device. See Receipts on mobile.
If you have a stack of receipts to file without a specific transaction in mind, upload them from the receipt inbox instead — Dash.fi reads each one and matches it to a card transaction for you.

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Bulk actions

To work through several expenses at once, select rows using the checkboxes on the left of the Transactions table. A bulk action bar appears at the top with the count of selected expenses and the actions below. Each action only runs on eligible rows. Anything that doesn’t qualify — for example, an already-submitted expense — is skipped and called out in a toast. The count next to each bulk button (for example, Submit 8) shows how many of your selected rows the action will touch. After the action runs, Dash.fi shows a toast summarising how many succeeded, failed, and were skipped. Selection clears automatically when you switch tabs, so moving between All, Draft, Submitted, and the other tabs won’t carry stale selections between them. The Merchant column stays pinned to the left as you scroll horizontally, and any AI-suggested spend category you haven’t accepted yet appears in italic, muted text in the category cell — click the cell to accept the suggestion or pick a different one. Finance teams reviewing expenses from Accounting → Card Transactions have a similar bulk action bar with Mark ready and bulk export — see Coding transactions for accounting for details.

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Download receipts as a ZIP

Expense administrators and accountants can pull down all the receipts attached to a set of expenses in a single archive — for example, to hand a month of receipts to an external auditor without downloading them one by one.

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Who can use it

You need the expense admin permission (typically expense administrators and finance / accounting users). Users without the permission still see the option in the export menu, but the export is scoped to their own expenses.

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How to trigger an export

  1. From Expenses (or Accounting → Card Transactions), apply the filters that describe the receipts you want — cardholder, status, date range, amount range, and any other filters available in the current view.
  2. Open the Export menu at the top-right of the table.
  3. Click Download receipts (zip).
  4. Confirm in the Download receipts? dialog. The archive covers the receipts attached to the expenses currently matching your filters — not just the ones visible on screen — so double-check the filters before confirming.
Dash.fi shows a toast once the request is queued. You can keep working; the archive is built in the background.

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Limits

If your filters match more than 1,000 receipts, Dash.fi rejects the export up front and asks you to narrow the filters — for example, by tightening the date range or picking a single cardholder. If the matched receipts fit under 1,000 items but together exceed 2 GiB once collected, the export fails and Dash.fi notifies you. Narrow the filters and try again.

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How the archive is delivered

When the archive is ready, Dash.fi sends you an in-app notification with a Download link that stays valid for 24 hours. Each file in the archive is named merchant-expenseId-originalfilename, so you can trace an individual receipt back to its expense. You’ll also get a notification if the export can’t be completed:
  • No receipts — none of the expenses matching your filters have receipts attached.
  • Too large — the receipts exceeded the 2 GiB archive cap during processing.
  • Failed — something went wrong on our side. Try again, or contact support if it keeps failing.
Missing receipt files (for example, a receipt that was recorded but never finished uploading) are skipped silently and don’t fail the export.

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Submit for approval

Once you’ve filled in the required fields, click Submit for Review at the bottom of the sheet. The expense status moves to Submitted and your approver is notified.

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Auto-submit

Dash.fi can submit your draft expenses for you once they meet your company’s policy. Auto-submit is on by default and runs behind the scenes, so if a draft is complete and in policy you don’t need to click Submit for Review yourself.

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What triggers a check

Dash.fi re-evaluates a draft whenever one of these things happens:
  • You edit a field on the expense.
  • The receipt matcher auto-attaches a card transaction with high confidence.
  • A receipt passes verification against a matched transaction.
Checks are debounced by about a minute per expense, so a burst of edits runs one check rather than one per keystroke. Only your own edits count — an accountant coding your draft for sync doesn’t trigger auto-submit on your behalf.

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When Dash.fi submits

A draft has to satisfy every one of these before Dash.fi will submit it:
  • Auto-submit my expenses is on for you.
  • The Expense product is enabled for your company.
  • The expense is anchored to a matched card transaction (auto-attached or confirmed).
  • The expense has a spend category. If you haven’t set one, Dash.fi codes it from your past choices for that merchant, or a high-confidence AI suggestion. If neither is available, the draft is left alone.
  • Your approval policy reports no missing fields (receipt, memo, and any other required fields).
If any of these fails, the expense stays in Draft for you to finish and submit yourself.

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After Dash.fi submits

Auto-submitted expenses run through the same approval policy as manually submitted ones:
  • Requires approval — the expense moves to Submitted and your approver is notified, just like a manual submission.
  • Auto-approved — the policy approves it outright and the expense moves straight to Approved.
  • Declined by policy — the expense stays in Draft so you can adjust it and submit yourself.
Returned expenses (in Needs Review) are never auto-submitted. Fix what your approver flagged and click Resubmit for Review.

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Turning auto-submit off

Open Expense settings from the top of the Expenses page and toggle Auto-submit my expenses off. The setting is per-user and only affects expenses you own — it doesn’t change your company’s policy, and it doesn’t affect anyone else’s expenses.

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Approver review

Approvers receive the expense in their Inbox. Opening it shows the full expense details — merchant, amount, category, memo, and receipt — along with Approve, Decline, and Return actions.
  • Approve — marks the expense as approved and moves it to the accounting sync queue
  • Decline — rejects the expense; the cardholder can see the outcome in their Approved or Needs Review tab
  • Return — sends the expense back to the cardholder with notes requesting changes
Approvers can also add notes to the expense directly from the approval view.

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Bulk approve or decline from the Inbox

The Inbox → To review list on desktop web has a bulk action bar for clearing multiple requests at once — expense submissions, bill payments, card requests, and vendor changes all live in the same queue. Use it when you have a stack of similar requests and don’t need to open each one.
  1. In Inbox → To review, select the checkbox on each row you want to act on. Only rows in Submitted status are selectable — Dash.fi skips anything already decided.
  2. Click Approve or Decline in the bulk action bar at the bottom of the table. The count next to each button (for example, Approve 8) shows how many of the selected rows the action will touch.
  3. Confirm in the dialog. Approve fulfils the underlying operation on each request; Decline rejects them and can’t be undone.
Dash.fi processes the batch and shows a toast summarising the result — for example, Approved 8 requests. If any items fail — say, another approver decided a request while you were reviewing — a second Failed to approve N requests toast reports the count that didn’t go through. Retry those individually. You need the same permission to bulk decide as you do to decide a single request — approvers with the standard Approval requests: write permission see the bulk actions automatically.

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If your expense is returned

When an approver sends an expense back, it moves to Needs Review status. Open the expense to see:
  • A Changes requested banner at the top of the Overview tab
  • Notes from your approver in the Notes tab explaining what to update
Make the requested changes and click Resubmit for Review.

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Notes

The Notes tab is a threaded conversation between you and your approver. Use it to add context, ask a question, or respond to feedback. Notes are visible to both parties and are timestamped. Press Enter to post a note. Use Shift + Enter for a line break.

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Activity

The Activity tab shows a timeline of every event on the expense: when it was submitted, reviewed, approved, or returned, and by whom. Use it to understand the history of an expense or follow up with an approver.