Understanding expense statuses in the HR queue

What each status pill and badge in the expense queue means, including the HR labels Add approvers and Ready to be completed, and the yellow Payroll Deduct badge.

Every expense in the HR expense queue carries a small status pill in the Status column so you can tell at a glance where it stands. Most pills show one of four plain statuses, but a few labels are specific to the HR view and tell you when an expense is waiting on you rather than on an employee or a reviewer. A separate yellow Payroll Deduct badge can sit alongside the pill. This article explains what each one means and how to act on it.

The four core statuses

Whatever else appears, an expense always resolves to one of these four states:

• Pending: submitted and waiting for a decision. Nobody has approved or declined it yet, or some reviewers have decided and others have not.
• Approved: cleared for reimbursement. Every required reviewer approved it.
• Changes requested: a reviewer asked the employee to fix something before it can move forward. The ball is in the employee's court.
• Declined: turned down. Open the expense to see the reason recorded with the decision.

These are the same statuses employees see on their own reports, so they match across the webapp.

Add approvers

A Add approvers label (a plain outlined pill) appears when an expense is still pending, has no approval flow attached, and has no reviewers assigned yet. It is a prompt: the expense cannot move until someone is set to review it. Open the expense and assign a reviewer to clear the label.

How a flow or reviewers change the pill

When an approval flow drives the expense, the pill shows the flow's progress instead of a plain status, for example Approval flow 2/3. That tells you the expense is on step 2 of a three-step flow, so two earlier stages are settled and one remains.

Without a flow but with reviewers assigned, a pending pill can show a decided / total count after the status, for example Pending 1 / 2, meaning one of two reviewers has decided. The count only appears while a review is still in progress: the final Approved and Changes requested pills never show a decided / total suffix.

Ready to be completed

A filled purple Ready to be completed label appears when every assigned reviewer has made a decision but the expense is still pending finalization. The review work is done; the expense just needs a final step from your team to close it out. This pill is shown only on the HR view, so the employee does not see it. Treat it as a short to-do list of expenses waiting on you.

CLVR shows Ready to be completed when both of these are true:

• The report has at least one assigned approver, and
• Every assigned approver has left a decision (none are still pending), yet the report status has not flipped to Approved or Declined.

In other words, the reviewing is done; the report just needs to be carried over the finish line. If a report instead has no approvers assigned at all, you see Add approvers instead, which is a separate situation.

How to finalize it

The Payroll Deduct badge

A yellow Payroll Deduct badge can sit next to the status pill. It appears when part of an expense was not covered by the employee's benefit allowance, so you can spot it at a glance. The badge is independent of the status pill: an expense can be Pending or Approved and still carry the badge, and it shows up for both the reviewing HR view and the employee's own list.

CLVR splits every expense into the part the benefit allowance covers and the part it does not. The badge shows whenever that second part is greater than zero. The uncovered part comes from two things added together:

• The amount that went past a tax-free threshold for the category (for example, wellness past the yearly tax-free limit).
• The amount that did not fit because the remaining allowance ran out (insufficient balance).

When either of those is above zero, the badge appears. To see the exact figure, open the expense: the detail view breaks the total into what the allowance paid and what falls outside it.

Purchases vs uploaded receipts

The badge looks the same on every row, but what actually happens to the uncovered amount depends on the expense type. See understanding expense types for the full picture.

• Benefit Store purchases. The employee ordered through CLVR and did not pay out of pocket, so CLVR or the provider fronts the cost. The uncovered part is recovered by deducting it from the employee's salary. On the expense detail you see a Payment Breakdown with Paid using allowance and Deducted from paycheck.
• Uploaded receipts. The employee already paid the provider themselves. The uncovered part is not deducted from their salary: it is simply not reimbursed, so it stays the employee's own out-of-pocket cost. There is no salary deduction in this case.

Where salary deductions are handled

Salary deductions for purchase remainders sit outside the standard payroll export files. Those export files (the spreadsheet or DTA/PAXML files you download for payroll) report the benefit value the employer credited this period, which is the amount the allowance covered. They deliberately do not include:

• The uncovered remainder of a Benefit Store purchase (the salary deduction).
• The unreimbursed overshoot on an uploaded receipt (the employee's own loss).

So when you export expenses for payroll, the figure that lands in the file is the allowance-covered amount. The salary deduction shown by the Payroll Deduct badge is handled separately, not through that export.

Where you see these pills and badges

The same status logic drives the pill in the queue's Status column and the badge at the top of an expense when you open it. So the label you see in the table is exactly the one you see inside the expense, with no surprises when you click in.

Troubleshooting

• A pill says Add approvers. The expense has no reviewer yet. Open it and assign one, or review and complete the report yourself.
• A pill says Ready to be completed. Every reviewer has decided; finish the final step to close it. Open the report and select Approve, then Submit review, from the Review Expense Report panel to move it to Approved.
• A Ready to be completed pill will not clear. Complete the review yourself from the Review Expense Report panel. An approver who requested changes moves the report to Changes requested instead, and an approver who declined finalizes it as Declined straight away, so neither stays in this state.
• The count looks off. The decided / total number only counts reviewers, not approval-flow steps. An expense on a flow shows flow progress (for example Approval flow 2/3) instead.
• An expense shows the Payroll Deduct badge but the employee says nothing was taken from their pay. Check the expense type. If it is an uploaded receipt, no salary deduction happens; the uncovered amount was the employee's own out-of-pocket cost, not a payroll deduction.
• The deducted amount is not in my payroll export. That is expected. Salary deductions for purchase remainders are handled outside the export files, which only carry the allowance-covered amount.
• I want the exact figure behind the badge. Open the expense and read the Payment Breakdown (for purchases) or the cost breakdown, rather than reading it off the badge alone. The badge is informational: it does not block approval and does not change how you approve or decline.