Expenses & vouchers
How money leaves your organisation — payment vouchers, the approval chain, staff requests, and paying an expense.
This section covers the money that leaves your organisation: paying a supplier, reimbursing a member of staff, disbursing aid to a beneficiary. In WAQAF every payment is recorded as a payment voucher — a single document that says who is being paid, how much, from which category and bank account, and who signed it off. Nothing is paid until the voucher has travelled through a fixed chain of approvals, and once it is paid the record is permanent.
Who can do this. The expense pages live inside the Finance module, so you need a finance role to see them at all. What you can do there depends on which finance permission your role carries:
- Create a voucher or code a request — a finance role that grants create, typically the Accountant or Finance Manager.
- Approve or reject — a role that grants approve: the Finance Manager or the CEO.
- Pay an approved voucher (execute the payment) — a role that grants update, again the Accountant or Finance Manager acting as treasurer.
Anyone who is a member of the organisation can raise a staff payment request, even without a finance role. If a button described here is missing for you, your role doesn't reach it; see Members & roles.
Where to find it. Finance → Expenses for the voucher list and approvals queue, and Finance → Requests for staff payment requests.
How a payment flows
Every expense follows the same approval chain, whatever the amount — there is no "small enough to skip approval" shortcut. The four stages are:
- Accountant — codes the expense: assigns it to a category, an expense label, and a pay-from account, and confirms the amount.
- Finance Manager — reviews and approves the coded voucher.
- CEO — gives the final sign-off. When the CEO is unavailable, a Finance Manager may approve this step on the CEO's behalf, but only with a written justification that is kept on the record.
- Treasurer — executes the payment. This is the step that actually posts the money to the ledger and marks the voucher Paid.
A voucher can be returned to the accountant for re-coding, or rejected outright, at any point before it is paid.
Paying is the point of no return. Up to and including approval, a voucher can be returned or rejected. The moment the treasurer pays it, the amount is posted to the ledger and the voucher is locked. A paid voucher is never edited or deleted — if it was wrong, it is corrected with a reversing entry, which leaves both the original and the correction visible in the record. Amounts throughout are in Omani rials to three decimals (for example 200.000).
Two ways a voucher starts
There are two doors into the same approval chain:
- A direct payment voucher. A finance user with create permission fills in the voucher form themselves — payee, amount, category, label, pay-from account — and it enters the chain already coded, waiting for the Finance Manager. Use this when finance already knows exactly what is being paid.
- A staff payment request. Any member of staff asks to be paid for something — describing what it is for, how much, and how they should receive it. The accountant then codes that request (assigning the category and label) and forwards it into the same chain. Use this when the person who needs the money isn't the person who keeps the books.
Both end up as the same kind of voucher and follow the identical Accountant → Finance Manager → CEO → Treasurer path.
A note on category balances
When you code a voucher to a category, WAQAF checks whether that category has enough budget. If it doesn't, you are not blocked — an over-balance spend is allowed by design, and the category balance is simply allowed to go negative (shown in red). You can instead add a deduct line to draw the overflow from a different category. Whether you see the actual balance figure, or only a "enough / not enough" indication, depends on your role: full balances are reserved for the Finance Manager, CEO and Auditor.
Pick a topic
Creating a payment voucher
Fill in the voucher form — payee, amount, category, label, and pay-from account.
The expense approval workflow
The Accountant → Finance Manager → CEO → Treasurer chain, and approving on the CEO's behalf.
Staff payment requests
How any member of staff asks to be paid, and how the accountant codes and forwards it.
Approving an expense by email
Sign off a voucher from the link in your inbox, without opening the dashboard.
Expense labels
The reporting labels that classify what each expense is for.
Printing payment vouchers
Produce a printed voucher with the signatures and category breakdown.