Configuring Tax Codes, Categories and Nominal Codes in the Expensemate portal will help you save countless administrative hours every month and aid you in becoming VAT efficient.

In this article, we explore some of the settings you need to be familiar with as an account administrator.

Configure your tax codes

The first step is to configure your tax codes based on the rates of tax you are able to claim as a business.

To do this, you need to navigate to the Tax Codes section of the portal.

By default, we set up your account with standard and zero rates but you can add as many as you need. You will also see that you can assign a code to a tax rate, which enables you to sync the codes in our system with your accounting package.

When you make a change, you will notice a confirmation bar pops into view at the bottom of the screen; click Cancel to discard your changes and Save Changes to confirm.

Manage categories and subcategories

Once your tax codes are set up, you need to assign them to your spend categories so that the system can make appropriate VAT suggestions when users assign categories to their expenses.

To access the categories screen, click Settings from the portal menu and select Categories.

The Expensemate platform uses the following parent categories:

• Other Vehicle Expenses
• Other
• Meals & Entertainment
• Fuel
• Personal Expense
• Travel
• Materials & Tools
• Services

These are fixed but you can customise the rates of tax associated with each category. For customisation relevant to your business categories, you can create bespoke subcategories with their own associated rates of tax. You can have as few or as many sub categories as you like.

Assigning nominal codes

In addition to tax codes, you can also assign nominal codes to your categories to ensure that they are bespoke to your organisation's accounting practices. These can be applied to high-level categories and sub-categories.

When you have finished making changes, use the confirmation bar at the bottom of the screen to save or discard.