Approve an expense claim

A member has paid for something on the club's behalf — a hall booking, a coaching course, a first-aid kit — and filed a claim to get it back. This recipe is deciding one: approving it, rejecting it with a reason, or marking it paid once you've made the transfer.

Who: Treasurer or Club Admin. Where: the volunteer console, Finances tab. Takes: about 2 minutes per claim.

Before you start

You can't decide your own claim — not even as a Club Admin. If you've filed one yourself, another finance volunteer needs to approve and pay it; the console hides the actions on your own claim rather than letting you try.

Steps

1. Open Finances in the volunteer console. A badge on the tab shows how many claims are waiting on a decision.
2. The Pending view lists them. Open one to see the amount, what it was for, the receipts — each downloads on its own — and the category the member picked, if they picked one.

3. Decide:
   • Approve — pick the category and, if it has any, the item the claim belongs to (required every time, whatever the member chose), then approve. Moves it to Approved, awaiting your bank transfer.
   • Reject — needs a reason. It's emailed straight to the member, so make it something they can act on.
4. Once you've actually made the bank transfer yourself, come back and Mark as paid, with an optional reference. RunClub HQ records the payment; making it is still yours to do, from the club's own account.

What happens next

• The member is emailed at every outcome — approved, rejected with your reason, or paid — and gets a push notification too, on the mobile app.
• An approved, paid claim shows up in the season's Finances report under Expenses, feeding the Surplus after expenses figure.
• Nothing here touches the club's bank account. Approving and marking paid are records of a decision; the transfer itself happens outside RunClub HQ, the ordinary way your club already pays people.

If it does not work

The claim has no receipt, or the wrong one

The member app won't let a claim through with no receipt at all, but what's attached might not actually back up the amount. Reject it and say so — there's no way to add a receipt to a claim once it's filed, so the member has to resubmit.

It's filed under the wrong category

Open it and Retag — you can do this to a decided claim too, so there's no need to reject and start again. If the category itself is wrong for every claim, rename it once under Finance → Expense Categories in the admin panel.

The member has left the club

That doesn't cancel money the club already owes them. Open, approve and mark their claim paid from their record exactly as normal.

See also

• Expense claims playbook — the full workflow, categories, and what treasurers cannot do
• Finances
• The volunteer console