Expenses

Instead of typing one number into an actuals cell and hoping you remember what it covered, you can record individual expenses under a line item — each with its own date, amount and description. Etropo adds them up per month, and that total becomes the actual on your budget grid.

The result: every actual can be opened up and explained. You see the €4,200 for March, and you see the three invoices and the one card payment that make it up.

How Expenses Become Actuals

• Add expenses to a line item, each dated to a specific day
• Etropo groups them by month and sums them
• That sum becomes the actual for the month — you don’t type it in
• The actual cell locks, because the expenses behind it are now the source of truth
• Remove all expenses from a month and the actual clears, unlocking the cell for normal editing again

Important: If a month already had an actual typed in and you then add an expense to it, the expense total replaces that number — it isn’t added to it. The cell then points at the expenses that explain it.

The Expenses Tab

Every line item has an Expenses tab:

1. Open your budget and click a line item’s name to open it
2. Switch to the Expenses tab

Expenses are grouped by month, newest month first, with a subtotal for each month. That subtotal is exactly what you’ll see in the grid’s actual cell for that month.

Each row shows the vendor or description, the date, the amount, and who added it.

Adding an Expense

Click Add Expense at the top of the tab and pick how you want to add it:

• Manually — record a payment yourself
• Attach invoice — upload a PDF and let Etropo extract the details

Adding One Manually

Fill in the expense:

• Expense date (required) — the day the money was spent. This decides which month the expense lands in.
• Amount (required) — what was spent. Negative amounts are allowed, which is handy for credits, refunds and corrections.
• Description (optional) — what it was for.

Click Add expense and the month’s actual updates immediately.

Attaching an Invoice

Attach invoice opens the same PDF upload used across Etropo. Once you confirm the invoice, it becomes an expense on this line item automatically. See the Invoice Automation guide for how extraction, review and confirmation work.

Adding From the Grid

If you’re already in the grid, right-click any actual cell and choose Add expense. That opens the line item’s Expenses tab with the form ready and dated to the month you clicked.

Editing and Removing Expenses

Each row has a menu on the right. What you can do depends on where the expense came from:

• Manual expenses — edit or delete
• Invoice expenses — read-only, marked with an Invoice badge. To change or remove one, reject or delete the invoice itself and the expense disappears with it.
• Migrated expenses — marked Migrated. These are the actuals you had before expenses existed, preserved as an opening balance so no spend was lost. You can delete them, but not edit them.

Deleting an expense recalculates the month straight away. Delete the last expense in a month and the actual clears rather than dropping to zero.

Expense Dates and the Budget Period

An expense has to fall inside the budget’s period. The date picker is limited to that range, and Etropo will tell you if a date falls outside it. If you need to record spend from before or after the budget period, adjust the budget’s start or end date first.

Locked Actual Cells

Some actual cells can’t be typed into. There are two reasons, and they look different in the grid:

• Derived from expenses — a receipt icon in the corner of the cell. Hover it and you’ll see “Derived from expenses — click to view”. Click the cell to jump straight to the Expenses tab behind it.
• Synced from an ad platform — the cell is inert because the daily sync owns that value. This applies to line items mapped to Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Meta Ads and TikTok Ads. Mapped line items can’t have expenses at all.

Locked cells are skipped by paste, fill, clear and multi-cell edits, so a bulk operation across a range won’t quietly overwrite an expense-backed month. You can still right-click a locked cell to leave a comment.

This works the same in the Actuals Editor and in the side-by-side Plans & Actuals view.

Expenses Across Budget Versions

Like actuals, expenses belong to the budget rather than to one version of it. Add an expense while you’re in a reforecast and it shows up in every version, and switching which version is active never moves or duplicates anything.

Duplicating a budget is different: the copy starts fresh and no expenses carry over.

Expenses and AI

When you ask AI Budget Buddy — in the app, in Slack, or through a connected AI tool — to update actuals, it won’t overwrite an expense-backed month. It skips those and tells you why, then applies the rest of your request as normal. To change an expense-backed month, edit the expenses behind it.

Who Can Add Expenses

Expenses follow the same permissions as the rest of the budget. If you have access to a line item’s category, you can add, edit and delete expenses on it. If you don’t, you won’t see the line item at all. See Access Control for details.

Best Practices

• Record expenses as they happen rather than reconciling one number at month end — then every actual already comes with its own breakdown when finance asks.
• Use the description field consistently. “AWS — November” beats “invoice” when you’re looking back six months later.
• Use negative amounts for credits and refunds instead of reducing an existing expense, so the original payment stays visible.
• Let invoices do the work. Forwarding invoices to your organization’s invoice email creates expenses without anyone typing anything.

For additional help you can reach out to our support team at: help@etropo.com