New: Travel & expenses

A new module is available in vemix as of today: Travel & expenses. Your staff can now settle business trips under German travel expense law – and their non-travel out-of-pocket expenses along with them. A case runs end to end: from the receipt photo on the phone to the money in the account.

First, a thank you

Before we talk about features, something else matters more to us. Our first customers have now been working productively with vemix for more than a month – and they enjoy doing so. Over that time they told us what runs smoothly and what doesn’t, where there’s one click too many, and which small detail makes the difference day to day. Part of what this module does well today is in it for exactly that reason.

We’d like to thank them for it. Entrusting a young product with your daily work means going first. We don’t take that for granted – and we’ll keep listening.

The receipt comes first

Someone on the road is holding a receipt, not a line item. That’s exactly how capture works: you photograph the receipt, and the line item is created from it. Receipt recognition then reads out the date, merchant, gross amount, tax rates, currency, country and receipt type – for hotel bills it even separates the lodging, breakfast and service portions.

What the AI reads is a suggestion. You confirm or correct it field by field, and every machine-filled value stays identifiable as such. A reviewer later sees both: what the machine read and what a human made of it.

Calculating the way the tax office expects

Meal allowances are settled by per diem only – that’s what tax law requires. The official rates for Germany and 166 countries, including cities with deviating rates, are stored with versioning, so every trip is calculated with the rates that applied on its date. The calculation engine knows arrival and departure days, the reduction for meals provided, and the three-month rule.

Travel and accommodation costs by receipt or by flat rate, incidental expenses, hospitality with its own rules, splitting a hotel bill into 7% and 19% – it’s all there, without anyone having to keep it in their head.

From approval to payout

A submitted expense report lands in the review cockpit for approval. Once approved, a settlement document is produced as a PDF: all line items, the employee’s bank details and payout amount, and every receipt attached. The employee signs it digitally via a signature request – the same e-signature you know from contracts. The report is then finalised and retained under § 147 AO.

Payout runs two ways: as an incoming document pushed to a connected accounting system (sevDesk or Lexware Office), or – without a connected system – as a SEPA batch transfer (pain.001). On top of that come the accounting/DATEV export including a receipts ZIP, the payroll tax report per employee and month, and a dataset for tax audits.

Why it lives inside vemix

A standalone expense app only solves half the job. It gets interesting where the costs belong: every line item can be assigned to a project, where it flows into project costing as actual expenses. If it’s marked as re-billable, it shows up in the billable backlog and moves from there into the next customer invoice – removable item by item, using the rates agreed per project.

That path – receipt, project, invoice – is precisely why vemix puts everything on one shared data foundation.

Availability

The module is available to all new tenants, including the free trial. For existing tenants we’ll enable it on request – a short message is enough.

The next major item we’re working on is financial planning (P&L, CAPEX and cash flow) based on the project and cost data you already capture. We’ll keep you posted right here.